Print LaTeX Table Directly to an Image (PNG or other)

Question

Is there a way to print, from within R, a LaTeX table directly to an image file (for inclusion in another document/webpage). Basically, I'd like to supply LaTeX code to a function that saves it as an image to the working directory.

Pipe dreams?

Answer 1

There are various LaTeX-to-Image converter scripts, designed to do things like convert equations into images for including on web pages.

If you can find one of those (dvipng perhaps?) then you can go from a table in R to LaTeX easy enough and then from LaTeX to png.

If you have dvipng, you can leverage Hmisc's latex conversions to make a neater function to do it:

dvipng.dvi <-
  function (object, file, ...) 
{
  cmd <- if (missing(file)) 
    paste("dvipng -T tight", shQuote(object$file))
  else paste("dvipng -T tight", "-o", file, shQuote(object$file))
  invisible(sys(cmd))
}

And then you can do:

> tt   # here is a table
   y
x    1  2  3
  1  9 12 11
  2 18  9 10
  3 10  7 14
> dvipng.dvi(dvi.latex(latex(tt)))

And that will produce a png file with a random name in the working directory. The -T tight option will crop all the whitespace from round it.

That's about as direct as I can think it possible.

Linux or Windows or Mac or Atari?