jeltef / pylatex

A Python library for creating LaTeX files

PyLaTeX

PyLaTeX is a Python library for creating and compiling LaTeX files or snippets. The goal of this library is being an easy, but extensible interface between Python and LaTeX.

Installation

Simply install using pip:

pip install pylatex

And then install a relevant LaTeX processor and other dependencies. Examples:

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install texlive-pictures texlive-science texlive-latex-extra latexmk

Documentation

There are two versions of the documentation:

• The one generated for the last stable release.
• The one based on the latest git version.

Contributing

Read the How to contribute page for tips and rules when you want to contribute.

Examples

The documentation contains a lot of examples that show the functionality. To give an impression of what can be generated see this picture:

Copyright and License

Copyright 2014 Jelte Fennema, under the MIT license

pylatex's Issues

Possible way to add pylatex in to Scribus CLI workflow

Just making a notation here. The Scribus CLI is still under development ATM but it would seem advantageous to hook in pyLaTex as a way to satisfy different needs.

Move CONTRIBUTING to the documentation

So everything is in one place.

Good docstrings for the baseclasses

Good documentation is needed for the base classes, since they are the hardest to understand.

Fix_filename

What should fix_filename("abc.def.fgh.ijk") return?

jobname cannot read paths

pdflatex --jobname="/home/eleve/vincent.lefoulon/Documents/MPF/data/prod/filename" "/home/eleve/vincent.lefoulon/Documents/MPF/data/prod/filename.tex" does not work whereas pdflatex --jobname="filename" "/home/eleve/vincent.lefoulon/Documents/MPF/data/prod/filename.tex" does. But the second command saves the file in the working directory.

pdflatex --output-directory ~/Documents/MPF/data/prod "/home/eleve/vincent.lefoulon/Documents/MPF/data/prod/filename.tex" would do the job and save the file as ~/Documents/MPF/data/prod/filename.pdf

Create a custom string class that is not escaped.

This makes it much easier to mix trusted and untrusted content.

Add a Command object

Proposed in #2.
Syntax like this:

Command('includegraphics', option='scale=0.5', argument='chick.png')

Maybe also an options or arguments option, so it can make commands with multiple arguments or options.

Specifying where the PDF should reside

How do I specify where the generated PDF file should reside? Adding an argument to the constructor only seems to control where the temporary Latex files get put -- I'd like to specify (also) where the actual PDF files is written.

"-", "--" and "---" are not escaped

In LaTeX -, -- and --- are commands for hyphen, en-dash and em-dash correspondingly.
Currently these characters are not escaped.

If you think that such behavior is a feature, I think it should be documented.

Graphicx support

rm_tmp called even if clean=False in generate_pdf

rm_tmp is called even if Document.generate_pdf is called with clean=False
Is this normal? if so, how do we compile several times to update cross references?

The problem are the graphics that are removed for the second call

Add a Table environment that is a floating environment

This should not be hard, but should be done before the 1.0.0 release because it means removing the old Table class that is now renamed to Tabular.

What needs to be done for the next release?

Clearly a lot has been done since v0.8.0, and the current package/documentation is a lot different from what it was a few months ago.

What needs to be done before the next release can be pushed out?

Default to escaping string content

This makes it much safer to use the PyLaTeX with untrusted content.

pip install

Hello,
Thanks to have merged the pull request 3 days ago.
Could you also push this master version on pip?
pip show display version 0.5 of PyLateX I don't know if this one is the current or not :)
Thanks in advance !

setting the documentclass

Hi,

Is it possible to set the documentclass? For instance, I want to use the Springer layout. In LaTeX I would write this:

\documentclass[runningheads]{llncs}

Where there is an llncs.cls style file.

But there are lots of different style, e.g. the IEEE format.

Thanks,

Laszlo

No docs on how the Vagrantfile works

@sebastianhaas Could you write something on how to use this?

Add multicol/multirow support for tables.

It would be sweet if we could use multirow/multicol in tables somehow.

Cheers

filename.out not cleaned if clean=True

If clean=True all files are removed correctly except of the filename.out file.

Question

Hello,
I read your introduction/presentation and you're saying:
"Everything else you want you can still add to the document by adding LaTeX formatted strings to the container class you want it to be in."
Could you provide an example ?

I would like to add a Tittle page at the very beggining of a document created with PyLaTeX.
Is it possible to add directly "raw" latex command such as \newpage or a group of these kind of lines with PyLaTeX ?
Thank you in advance! :)

Make latexmk the default compiler with fallback to pdflatex

Latexmk is much better, since it compiles as often as needed for more complicated documents.

Tikz integration

This is an excellent project. I am currently generating latex using Python scripts for my work already.

Can I suggest that instead of generating tikz, we improve matplotlib so that it can generate comparable quality images with similar ease? I am working on it here: https://github.com/MisterSheik/matplotlib

Best,

Neil

Container.propegate_packages() is spelled wrong

It's minor, since it seems like the function is only intended for internal use and the misspelling is consistent, but I imagine it might lead to problems with collaboration down the line.

The spelling should be "propagate".

excape_latex does not repleace Nonbreaking spaces.

If a string contained the unicode character "x0A" ie the nonbreaking space,
Then this is passed through the to the output document.

It should be replaces with a ~ which is the latex character for the same

My work around is:
string.replace("\xA0", "~").

Running (certain) latex compilers on the output will result in:
"Package inputenc Error: Keyboard character used is undefined(inputenc) in inputencoding `utf8'. ...s who act together to save the planet."

Create a better way to propagate defaults class defaults through the class tree

Currently everything is passed on and on with *args and **kwargs, but this makes it very unclear what can be passed on.

TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'argument', in "pylatex/numpy.py", line 20

Hi!

When using the VectorName class, I got that error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "latex.py", line 56, in <module>
    latex.save("./test")
  File "latex.py", line 35, in save
    self.draw()
  File "latex.py", line 28, in draw
    k, v = self.parse(k, v)
  File "latex.py", line 20, in parse
    return VectorName("wsd"), Matrix(v)
  File "/home/vincent/.local/share/virtualenvs/mpf/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pylatex/numpy.py", line 20, in __init__
    super().__init__('mathbf', argument=name)
TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'argument'

Yet, the code on GitHub is correct. Is the version on Pypi up-to-date?

Thanks!

Mathmode support

Fix all the TODO's

I have written a couple of TODO's in the comments and those need to be fixed.

Add unit tests

Hi!

I wonder whether it would be interesting to implement unit tests like that:

doc = Document()

# ...

tex = """
...
"""

assert doc.dumps() == tex

Thanks!

BaseLaTeXNamedContainer not supporting multiple arguments

Is there a reason BaseLaTeXNamedContainer is currently only supporting a single argument?

According to this, environments can have up to 9 parameters:
http://www.emerson.emory.edu/services/latex/latex_19.html

I'm happy to provide a patch if this is unintentional.

README example fails (l.9 \pgfplotsset{compat=newest})

When running the example from the README:

import numpy as np

from pylatex import Document, Section, Subsection, Table, Math, TikZ, Axis, \
    Plot, Figure, Package
from pylatex.numpy import Matrix
from pylatex.utils import italic, escape_latex

doc = Document()
doc.packages.append(Package('geometry', options=['tmargin=1cm',
                                                 'lmargin=10cm']))

with doc.create(Section('The simple stuff')):
    doc.append('Some regular text and some ' + italic('italic text. '))
    doc.append(escape_latex('\nAlso some crazy characters: $&#{}'))
    with doc.create(Subsection('Math that is incorrect')) as math:
        doc.append(Math(data=['2*3', '=', 9]))

    with doc.create(Subsection('Table of something')):
        with doc.create(Table('rc|cl')) as table:
            table.add_hline()
            table.add_row((1, 2, 3, 4))
            table.add_hline(1, 2)
            table.add_empty_row()
            table.add_row((4, 5, 6, 7))

a = np.array([[100, 10, 20]]).T
M = np.matrix([[2, 3, 4],
               [0, 0, 1],
               [0, 0, 2]])

with doc.create(Section('The fancy stuff')):
    with doc.create(Subsection('Correct matrix equations')):
        doc.append(Math(data=[Matrix(M), Matrix(a), '=', Matrix(M*a)]))

    with doc.create(Subsection('Beautiful graphs')):
        with doc.create(TikZ()):
            plot_options = 'height=6cm, width=6cm, grid=major'
            with doc.create(Axis(options=plot_options)) as plot:
                plot.append(Plot(name='model', func='-x^5 - 242'))

                coordinates = [
                    (-4.77778, 2027.60977),
                    (-3.55556, 347.84069),
                    (-2.33333, 22.58953),
                    (-1.11111, -493.50066),
                    (0.11111, 46.66082),
                    (1.33333, -205.56286),
                    (2.55556, -341.40638),
                    (3.77778, -1169.24780),
                    (5.00000, -3269.56775),
                ]

                plot.append(Plot(name='estimate', coordinates=coordinates))

    with doc.create(Subsection('Cute kitten pictures')):
        with doc.create(Figure(position='h!')) as kitten_pic:
            kitten_pic.add_image('docs/static/kitten.jpg', width='120px')
            kitten_pic.add_caption('Look it\'s on its back')

doc.generate_pdf()

my LaTeX fails with the following message:

! Package pgfkeys Error: I do not know the key '/pgfplots/compat' and I am goin
g to ignore it. Perhaps you misspelled it.

See the pgfkeys package documentation for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.9 \pgfplotsset{compat=newest}

followed by

CalledProcessError: Command 'pdflatex --jobname="default_filename" "default_filename.tex"' returned non-zero exit status 1

Is it some missing package? I am running on Ubuntu 12.04, equipped with texlive-full.

Unicode support

I can't write PDF file in cyrillic.

Add documentation

Currently the only documentation are the examples. This should be changed.

Replace Sphinx style docstrings for Numpy style.

Numpy style docstrings are much more readable when reading the actual source code. It is important that this is consistantly used everywhere.

Create simpler subclassable version of command

A version of command that can be subclassed and that latex_name is then used as the name of the command. This can probably easily be done by creating a subclass of Command with an init function.

This should then also be used with the Package class and in the "Own commands" example.

Is pip package up-to-date ?

I think the pip package is out of date as the API does not match the documentation. I spent quite a lot of time to find where is the Command and Options classes as they were not in the base_classes module.

https://jeltef.github.io/PyLaTeX/pylatex/pylatex.base_classes.command.html

xeLaTeX needed

I can not write in Chinese, cause my Mac need xeLaTeX as compiler.
e.g.

import pylatex

doc = pylatex.Document(maketitle=True)

with doc.create(pylatex.Section(r'第一节')):
    pass

doc.generate_pdf()

this can not generate .pdf successfully, the following code is needed for .tex

% !TEX program = xelatex

How to cite?

em... Where is the API reference?

What's the point of `real_data` attribute in `BaseLaTeXContainer`?

Hello!

I don't understand what the real_data attribute is for in the BaseLaTeXContainer class. I would code the __init__ method like below but I don't know if real_data needs to be None.

def __init__(self, data=[], packages=None):
    self.data = data
    self.real_data = data  # Always the data of this instance

    super().__init__(packages=packages)

Thanks!

Make functions/methods private that should not be part of the API

This will make it easier to change the internal API without breaking changes for users.

Support for subcaption package

I don't know if this is the right place for this, but I implemented a new class SubFigure for use with the subcaption package (http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/caption/subcaption.pdf)

Should I make a pull request?

Cannot install from source

Installing on Python 2 from source fails with

$ pip install -e .
Obtaining file:///Users/me/Projekte/pylatex/PyLaTeX
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    running egg_info
    error: error in 'egg_base' option: 'python2_source' does not exist or is not a directory

    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /Users/me/Projekte/pylatex/PyLaTeX

Remove section and table base classes

There is no point in having these. TabularBase could just be Tabular and SectionBase could just be Section. There is no need to have pointless baseclasses.

Integrate better NumPy matrix code

A simple way to convert NumPy matrices and arrays to LaTeX formatted matrices or vectors.

Tag releases

Hello!
Please tag your releases, so I can include them in MacPorts more easily.

Thanks,
Aljaž

'./testall.sh' does not work if the system python version is still 2.*

If the system default python version is still 2.*, the testall.sh script will try to run the 'python2_source' tests, resulting in the test failing as the folder does not exist.

I propose to add an optional command line argument, which allows to indicate the python command to be used. This will also allow the user to test everything under different python versions,.
e.g. ./testall.sh -p python3

Insert matplotlib plots

Would you be interested in a simple way to insert plots created with matplotlib? Just need to:

• Save the plot as plot.pdf
• Include this file
• Delete plot.pdf

Looks like:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
y = [15, 2, 7, 1, 5, 6, 9]

plt.plot(x, y)
plt.savefig("./plot.pdf")

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{graphicx}


\begin{document}

Some text.

\begin{figure}[htbp]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{plot}
  \caption{SVG sexy image}
\end{figure}

Some other text.

\end{document}

Add stuff about string escaping to docs

How to disable it and stuff. Maybe even a special example.

French (and other languages) special character support

Could it be feasible to implement support for characters such as é, è,ù ê, à and others?

Deleting files does not work on Windows

Deleting files does not work on Windows.
Because you're using linux command "rm'.
It is better to use os.remove:
https://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html#os.remove