LaTeX and Python

Recently, I’ve been working a project that needs some report generation. I decided to have Python write to a LaTeX file and then let LaTeX handle all of the formatting goodness — like it does so well — of making a PDF.

To do this, I have a template TEX file will all of the necessary preamble. Whenever a script needs to generate a report, it copies the template like so:

shutil.copy(template_location, report_location)

Then, I write all of the text I need (from a list of line) like so (example of placing a subsection title included here).

with open( report_location , 'a') as report:
        report.writelines("\n\\subsubsection*{"+section_name_variable+"}")
        report.writelines("%s\n" % line for line in lines_to_write)

If I want to include a figure, that does get a little more complicated, so I wrote a function for preparing the lines for a figure (which could then be the “lines to write” in the last snippet.

def prepare_figure_lines(caption, path_to_graphic):
    lines = ['\\begin{figure}[H]'
        , '\\centering'
        , '\\includegraphics[width=\\textwidth]{'+outpath+'}'
        , '\\caption{\\label{fig} '+ caption + '}'
        , '\\end{figure}'
        ]
    return lines

And when you’ve gotten everything in your latex file, you have to end the document like this.

with open(report_location, 'a') as report:
    report.writelines("\n \\end{document}")