# Revisiting Mathematical Equations in R: The 'dvir' package

by Paul Murrell

Version 1: Thursday 30 August 2018

This report describes an R package called 'dvir' that aims to use TeX as a layout engine, but performs all rendering within R. The package reads DVI files that are produced from TeX files and renders the content using the R package 'grid'.

## 1. Mathematical Equations in R

The image below shows a 'lattice' (Sarkar, 2008) line plot of the Standard Normal probability distribution function, with a text annotation showing the general form of the Gaussian function. This image was drawn with R (R Core Team, 2018) using the "plotmath" feature that makes it possible to annotate a plot with mathematical equations (Murrell and Ihaka, 2000)

The basic text-drawing functions in R graphics all accept, in addition to a simple character value, an R expression. An R expression is interpreted as a mathematical equation, with certain symbols, such as mu and sigma, converted to greek characters, and certain functions, such as frac and sqrt treated as layout instructions similar to the \frac and \sqrt operators in TeX mathematical expressions (Knuth, 1986). The following R code provides a simple example and the result is shown below the code.

expr <- expression(bgroup("(", frac(x - mu, sigma), ")"))
library(grid)
grid.text(expr)


The algorithm used to draw the mathematical equations in R attempts to mimic the algorithm used by TeX, but unfortunately the result is nowhere near the quality of the real thing.

One significant difference arises from the fact that R does not use the TeX math fonts, but it is possible to make use of the TeX fonts, with the 'fontcm' extension (Chang et al., 2014) to the 'extrafont' package (Chang, 2014), as shown below.

library(extrafont)
font_install('fontcm')
pdf("fontcm.pdf", width=1, height=1)
grid.text(expr,
gp=gpar(fontfamily="CM Roman"))
dev.off()
embed_fonts("fontcm.pdf", outfile="fontcm-embed.pdf")


While this shows a small improvement (the greek symbols are TeX's math italic variants), it is still some distance from the TeX result, which is shown below.

A different approach to including mathematical equations within R plots is to use the 'tikzDevice' package. This allows us to specify an equation using TeX syntax within character values. For example, we can write code like the following.

grid.text("$\\frac{x - \\mu}{\\sigma}$")


The following code reproduces the plot from the start of this section with the full Gaussian function annotation.

library(tikzDevice)
options(tikzDocumentDeclaration =
"\\documentclass[12pt]{article}")
tikz("tikz.tex", standAlone=TRUE, height=4)
tex <- "$g(x) = \\frac{1}{\\sigma\\sqrt{2\\pi}}e^{-\\frac{1}{2}(\\frac{x - \\mu}{\\sigma})}$"
xyplot(y ~ x, type="l", ylim=c(0, .6),
panel=function(...) {
panel.xyplot(...)
ltext(0, .5, tex)
})
dev.off()


This produces a full-quality TeX version of the mathematical equation because the 'tikzDevice' package generates a TeX version (actually a PGF/TikZ version) of the entire plot. This is evident in the fact that the axis and tick labels on the plot are also rendered using TeX fonts.

TeX fonts everywhere is a nice feature if the plot is to be used within a TeX document, but it can be undesirable if all we want is the equation in TeX format.

This report introduces an R package called 'dvir' that allows the plot to be normal R graphics with just the equation rendered in full-quality TeX layout and fonts. The package is in the early stages of development, but it can reproduce plain LaTeX output within R, on a range of graphics devices, on Linux.

The next section describes the convenient high-level interface that the 'dvir' package provides for rendering LaTeX equations in R graphics. Subsequent sections document the lower-level interface and internal design of the 'dvir' package.

## 2. The 'dvir' package

The simplest interface provided by the 'dvir' package is the grid.latex function. The first argument to this function is a character value, which is interpreted as LaTeX code. This can be just plain text, but it can also contain, for example, TeX mathematical expressions. The following code provides a simple demonstration.

library(dvir)

grid.latex("$x - \\mu$")


It is also possible to use standard LaTeX commands, as in the following example.

grid.latex("plain, {\\it italic}, and {\\bf bold}")


The following code shows the how the grid.latex function can be used to generate a complete plot with Gaussian function annotation (the LaTeX string tex was defined in the 'tikzDevice' example above).

xyplot(y ~ x, type="l", ylim=c(0, .6),
panel=function(...) {
panel.xyplot(...)
grid.latex(tex, 0, .5, default.units="native")
})


In the following example, we use the 'xtable' package (Dahl, 2016) to generate LaTeX code for a table and then 'dvir' to draw the table within a 'lattice' plot.

library(xtable)
xyplot(mpg ~ disp, mtcars,
panel=function(...) {
panel.xyplot(...)
floating=FALSE)
grid.latex(tex,
x=unit(1, "npc") - unit(2, "mm"),
y=unit(1, "npc") - unit(2, "mm"),
just=c("right", "top"))
})


The grid.latex function is just a thin wrapper around a call to LaTeX, which generates a DVI file, followed by calls to functions that read the DVI file and render its contents in R. These functions that read and render DVI files make up the real heart of the 'dvir' package and provide the focus for the remainder of this report.

A standard LaTeX workflow consists of writing a source file containing LaTeX text and code (suffix .tex) and then running pdflatex on that file to produce a PDF document. An alternative is to run latex, which produces an intermediate DVI file (suffix .dvi), and then dvips or dvisvgm (or even dvipdfm) to produce a PostScript or SVG (or PDF) document from the DVI file.

A DVI file is a device-independent description of the placement of individual characters on a page. It contains instructions that move the current location across or up and down, define fonts, select fonts, place characters at the current location, and draw vertical and horizontal rectangles.

The 'dvir' package provides a function readDVI to read a DVI file into R. For example, the following LaTeX code describes a very simple document that just contains the word "Hello". This code has been saved in a text file called "simple.tex.

  \documentclass[12pt]{standalone}
\begin{document}
Hello
\end{document}


If we run latex on that file ...

system("latex simple.tex")


... we get a DVI file called simple.dvi and the following code reads that DVI file into R.

dvi <- readDVI("simple.dvi")
dvi

  pre          version=2, num=25400000, den=473628672, mag=1000,
comment= TeX output 2018.08.30:2212
bop          counters=1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0, p=-1
down4        a=1069005536
push
y4           a=-1073741823
down4        a=1073741823
push
right3       b=-4736287
y0
down3        a=546132
push
push
push
fnt_def_1    fontnum=14, checksum=1487622411, scale=786432, design=786432,
fontname=cmr12
fnt_num_14
set_char_72  'H'
set_char_101 'e'
set_char_108 'l'
set_char_108 'l'
set_char_111 'o'
pop
pop
pop
pop
pop
eop
post
fnt_def_1    fontnum=14, checksum=1487622411, scale=786432, design=786432,
fontname=cmr12
post_post


The DVI format is a binary format (Knuth, 1995), so 'dvir' uses the 'hexView' package to define memory blocks for each possible DVI operation and to read those memory blocks from the DVI file. The result of readDVI is a "DVI" object, which is a list of 'hexView' "rawFormat" objects ...

class(dvi[[1]])

  [1] "flatRawFormat" "rawFormat"

dvi[[1]]

  =======op.opcode
0  :  f7                                                                 |  247
=======op.opparams.i
1  :  02                                                                 |  2
=======op.opparams.num
2  :  01 83 92 c0                                                        |  25400000
=======op.opparams.den
6  :  1c 3b 00 00                                                        |  473628672
=======op.opparams.mag
10  :  00 00 03 e8                                                        |  1000
=======op.opparams.comment.length
14  :  1b                                                                 |  27
=======op.opparams.comment.string
15  :  20 54 65 58 20 6f 75 74 70 75 74 20 32 30 31 38 2e 30 38 2e 33 30  |   TeX output 2018.08.30
37  :  3a 32 32 31 32                                                     |  :2212


... and it is easy to run through the list of DVI operations simply by calling lapply (or sapply) on this list. For example, the following code generates a numeric vector containing all of the operation codes from the DVI file.

sapply(dvi, function(op) { hexView::blockValue(op$blocks$op.opcode) })

   [1] 247 139 160 141 165 160 141 145 161 239 239 159 141 141 141 243 185  72 101 108 108 111 142 142
[25] 142 142 142 140 248 243 249


## 4. Rendering DVI files

The grid.dvi function renders a "DVI" object, by converting the DVI instructions from a DVI file into 'grid' drawing on an R graphics device.

grid.dvi(dvi)


The essential steps in faithfully rendering the DVI file are as follows:

• coordinate systems: Convert DVI locations and distances into an R graphics coordinate system
• font mappings: Convert DVI font definions into R graphics font specifications
• character encodings: Convert DVI characters into R character values

### Coordinate systems

The DVI coordinate system has (0, 0) at top-left and the scale of locations and distances is defined in the first "preamble" operation in the DVI file.

  pre          version=2, num=25400000, den=473628672, mag=1000,
comment= TeX output 2018.08.30:2212


We multiply a location or distance by the numerator, divide by the denominator, multiply by the magnitude, and divide by 1000 to get a value in 10^(-7)mm units.

The 'grid' package can specify locations and dimensions in mm via the unit function. What the 'dvir' package actually does is calculate a bounding box from the DVI operations, create a 'grid' viewport based on the size of that bounding box (in mm), with an x-scale and a y-scale that encompasses the DVI operations, and renders the DVI operations using "native" coordinates within the viewport.

### Font mappings

The most important part of a DVI font definition is the fontname. In our simple example, this name is cmr12 (a Computer Modern Roman serif font at 12pt size).

  fnt_def_1    fontnum=14, checksum=1487622411, scale=786432, design=786432,
fontname=cmr12


We must generate an R graphics font specification from just this font name, a task that is complicated by the fact that font specifications are different for different graphics devices in R.

In the case of the pdf graphics device, we specify a font by giving the name of a Type 1 Font definition and we define a Type 1 Font by specifying a path to an AFM (Adobe Font Metrics) file. We also need to find a path to a PFB (Printer Font Binary) file so that we can embed the actual font within the final PDF file.

The 'dvir' package uses the kpsewhich program to first find the font mapping file pdftex.map, which contains information on mappings from font names (as seen in the DVI file) to actual font files, and then kpsewhich again to find the actual font files. Some typical results on an Ubuntu system with TeX Live are shown below. First, we have the location of the pdftex.map file ...

mapfile <- system("kpsewhich pdftex.map", intern=TRUE)
mapfile

  [1] "/var/lib/texmf/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map"


... and the line in this file for the cmr12 DVI font name shows the name of an actual font file at the end of the line ...

system("grep ^cmr12 $(kpsewhich pdftex.map)", intern=TRUE)   [1] "cmr12 CMR12 <cmr12.pfb"  We can get the location of this PFB file ... pfbfile <- system("kpsewhich cmr12.pfb", intern=TRUE) pfbfile   [1] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.pfb"  ... and the location of the corresponding AFM file ... afmfile <- system("kpsewhich cmr12.afm", intern=TRUE) afmfile   [1] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm"  This gives us enough information to create a Type 1 Font definition called "cmr12" in R ... Type1Font("cmr12", rep(afmfile, 4))  $family
[1] "cmr12"

$metrics [1] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm" [2] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm" [3] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm" [4] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm" [5] "Symbol.afm"$encoding
[1] "default"

attr(,"class")
[1] "Type1Font"


... and we can then draw text with 'grid' using that font (on a pdf device) by specifying "cmr12" as the font family ...

pdf("test.pdf", width=1, height=.5)
grid.text("Test", gp=gpar(fontfamily="cmr12"))
dev.off()


For the resulting PDF file to display properly, it is best to embed the fonts in the PDF file with the embedFonts function. This requires us to specify the locations of the PFB files to embed.

embedFonts("test.pdf", outfile="test-embed.pdf",
options=paste0("-sFONTPATH=", pfbfile))


The 'dvir' package provides a fontPaths function that can generate the information needed to embed fonts. It works with a grob that is created by grid.dvi. In the code below, rather than drawing DVI output, we just create a grob from a DVI object and use fontPaths to generate the locations of fonts within that DVI object.

fontPaths(dviGrob(dvi, device="pdf"))

  [1] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm"


The postscript graphics device also uses Type 1 fonts, so is handled in exactly the same way as the pdf device.

However, Cairo-based devices (Packard et al., 2018) (e.g., x11(type="cairo") and cairo_pdf) require a different approach to font mapping. Specifying a font on these devices is more convenient in R because we just have to give a font family name, like "Times". Unfortunately, that makes it harder to map a DVI font name to an R font specification for these devices.

The Cairo devices find an actual font from a font family name using a program called fontconfig. For example, when we specify "Times" in R, the actual font that gets used is whatever fontconfig finds as the best match.

system("fc-match Times", intern=TRUE)

  [1] "texgyretermes-regular.otf: \"TeX Gyre Termes\" \"Regular\""


Because R only gives fontconfig a font family, the first step is to map the DVI font name to a font family. The 'dvir' package does this by looking at the AFM file (found above) and extracting the FamilyName field.

head(readLines(afmfile))

  [1] "StartFontMetrics 2.0"
[2] "Comment Creation Date: Mon Jul 13 16:17:00 2009"
[3] "FontName CMR12"
[4] "FullName CMR12"
[5] "FamilyName Computer Modern"
[6] "Weight Medium"


This font family by itself is not specific enough to ensure that fontconfig will find the same font that was used to create the DVI file. However, it is possible to create configuration files for fontconfig that influence how it matches family names to actual fonts.

The 'dvir' package performs several steps to force fontconfig to find the right font. First, we append the FullName from the AFM file to the family name (e.g., in the case above, the family name becomes Computer Modern CMR12). Next, we generate a fontconfig configuration entry that expands this family name to a more detailed font specification. The configuration also ensures that fontconfig will search in the directory that contains the font we want to match. An example is shown below and the effect of this configuration is that when fontconfig attempts to match a font with "family" name Computer Modern CMR12, the match is modified to find a font with "family" Computer Modern and "postscriptname" CMR12.

  <dir>/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm</dir>
<match target="pattern">
<test name="family" mode="eq">
<string>Computer Modern CMR12</string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
<string>Computer Modern</string>
</edit>
<edit name="postscriptname" mode="assign" binding="strong">
<string>CMR12</string>
</edit>
</match>


The 'dvir' package generates these font configurations on the fly, as it reads a DVI file, which means that it must force fontconfig to load these new font configurations. This is done via a fork of the 'gdtools' package, which provides a fontconfig_reinit function (see the Technical requirements Section).

As well as mapping to the correct font file, so that text is drawn correctly, 'dvir' must access the correct font metric information (because when a DVI file says to draw a character we must move the current position forward to the end of that character, which requires knowing the exact character width).

For the pdf and postscript devices, this font metric information is taken from the AFM file. For Cairo-based devices, an off-screen pdf device is created and the AFM files are used with that device (because the Cairo and PangoCairo font metric information that is provided by Cairo-based devices did not prove to be consistently accurate).

### Character encodings

The final piece required for properly rendering a DVI file in R is to correctly generate character values from set_char operations.

  set_char_72  'H'
set_char_101 'e'
set_char_108 'l'
set_char_108 'l'
set_char_111 'o'


As we can see, the DVI file contains instructions such as "typeset character 72". How do we interpret the number 72 as a character? This number means the seventy-second character within the current font, so the answer depends on which font has been selected. For example, if we look within the AFM files for two different fonts, cmr12 (for normal english text) and cmmi12 (for mathematical equations), we can see that, while the seventy-second character in both fonts is 'H', the thirty-third character is an exclamation sign in cmr12, but it is the Greek character omega in cmmi12.

  StartFontMetrics 2.0
Comment Creation Date: Mon Jul 13 16:17:00 2009
FontName CMR12
FullName CMR12
FamilyName Computer Modern
Weight Medium
...
C 33 ; WX 271 ; N exclam ; B 86 0 184 715 ;
...
C 72 ; WX 734 ; N H ; B 41 0 692 683 ;

  StartFontMetrics 2.0
Comment Creation Date: Mon Jul 13 16:17:00 2009
FontName CMMI12
FullName CMMI12
FamilyName Computer Modern
Weight Medium
...
C 33 ; WX 610 ; N omega ; B 12 -10 594 442 ;
...
C 72 ; WX 811 ; N H ; B 46 0 858 683 ;


We saw in the previous section that we can specify the current DVI font for R graphics devices, but we still need to select the correct character from the current font.

To make things more complicated, when we draw text within R, we must provide a character value. This means that, we must somehow choose a character value that corresponds to the seventy-second character within the current font. This is the inverse of the first problem: we now want to go from a character to a number.

Fortunately, for the limited set of 128 ASCII characters, we can rely on a consistent mapping between characters and numbers. For example, the character value "H" will be converted to the number 72 and the character value "!" will be converted to the number 33 (and vice versa).

For the pdf and postscript graphics devices, we now have almost everything we need. We can take the character number in the DVI file and convert it to an ASCII character value ...

rawToChar(as.raw(72))

  [1] "H"


... and we can rely on the character value "H" being converted to the number 72 to find the seventy-second character in the current font.

However, one final detail is required. For Type 1 Fonts on the pdf and postscript graphics devices, there is another conversion to worry about. The character number is converted to a character name to find the actual "glyph" (letter shape) that will be drawn by the font. We can see this correspondence in the lines of the AFM files above. For example, in the cmr12 font, character 33 (C 33) corresponds to the character name exclam (N exclam). In the cmmi12 font, character 33 corresponds to the character name omega. These character names are used to identify the glyphs in the PFB files (which are the shapes that are actually drawn by the graphics device).

This means that we must set up the correct mapping between character numbers and character names for each Type 1 Font that we use.

The 'dvir' package generates this "character encoding" for each font from the font AFM file, based on the order of the characters within the file, and the character encoding is then specified as part of the Type 1 Font that we create. For example, the first few characters in the cmr12 font are shown below ...

  StartFontMetrics 2.0
Comment Creation Date: Mon Jul 13 16:17:00 2009
FontName CMR12
FullName CMR12
FamilyName Computer Modern
Weight Medium
...
C 0 ; WX 611 ; N Gamma ; B 41 0 570 681 ;
C 1 ; WX 815 ; N Delta ; B 46 0 769 714 ;
C 2 ; WX 761 ; N Theta ; B 54 -21 707 704 ;
C 3 ; WX 679 ; N Lambda ; B 31 0 648 714 ;
C 4 ; WX 652 ; N Xi ; B 41 0 611 678 ;


... and this produces an encoding file that begins like this ...

  /cmr12Encoding [
/Gamma
/Delta
/Theta
/Lambda
/Xi


... and this encoding file, along with the AFM file, is used to define a Type 1 Font with the correct encoding ...

  $family [1] "cmr12"$metrics
[1] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm"
[2] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm"
[3] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm"
[4] "/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr12.afm"
[5] "Symbol.afm"

$encoding [1] "/tmp/RtmpN9zwZd/cmr12.enc" attr(,"class") [1] "Type1Font"  In the case of characters in the english alphabet, on the pdf and postscript graphics devices, things are relatively straightforward. For example, the DVI character number 72 is converted to the R character value "H". That will be converted to the number 72 and the seventy-second character name in encoding file for the font will be H, which will produce a glyph that draws an 'H'. For characters outside the english alphabet, things can get more complicated. For example, the DVI character number 33 will be converted to the R character value "!", which will be converted to the number 33. For the font cmr12, the encoding converts 33 to the character name exclam, which will draw an exclamation glyph, but for the font cmmi12, the encoding converts 33 to the character name omega, which will draw a glyph representing the Greek character omega. To produce a summation sign within a mathematical equation, the DVI font is cmex10, the DVI character number is 80, the R character value is "P", which is converted back to 80, the encoding converts 80 to the character name summationtext, which will draw a summation glyph like the one below. grid.latex("$\\sum\$")


Unfortunately, the situation is completely different for Cairo-based graphics devices.

One advantage of using the Cairo-based devices is that we are able to use UNICODE UTF-8 character values when specifying text to draw, which means that we can specify any character in an R character value. For example, we can specify a Greek omega character with "\U03C9".

"\U03C9"

  [1] "ω"


The downside of the Cairo-based devices is that, from R, we cannot control the details of the conversions between numbers and characters, such as character encodings, as we did for the pdf device. This means that we have to make sure that the R character value that we feed into a Cairo-based graphics device is something that will select the correct glyph from the current font.

The approach taken by the 'dvir' package is to convert DVI character numbers into UNICODE character values and rely on Cairo to map the UNICODE values to the correct font glyphs. For example, 72 is converted into "\U0048" (the UNICODE code point for "H") and Cairo maps that UNICODE code point to an 'H' glyph in the current font.

This approach still requires a conversion from DVI character numbers to UNICODE character values. As we noted at the start of this section, the DVI character number i specifies the ith character within the current font, so the conversion will depend on which font we are currently using.

The 'dvir' package currently specifies these conversions through hard-coded tables and supports UNICODE conversions for several basic TeX fonts: Computer Modern Roman, e.g., cmr12, Computer Modern Math Italic, e.g., cmmi12, Computer Modern Math Symbols, e.g., cmsy12, and Computer Modern Math Extensions, e.g., cmex10.

dvir:::rawToUTF8(as.raw(33), "CMR")

  [1] "!"

dvir:::rawToUTF8(as.raw(33), "CMMI")

  [1] "ω"


The cmex10 font is an exceptional case. This font contains symbols for mathematical equations such as large brackets (character name parenleftbig). The problem is that some of these symbols have no counterpart in UNICODE, which means that it is not possible to specify a UNICODE character value that will select these glyphs from a font.

The solution to this problem in 'dvir' is to provide a customised font called cmexunicode10. This is the same as the cmex10 font, but all of the glyphs in the font have been renamed to use the same character names as cmr12. The conversion from DVI number to UTF-8 that is used for cmex10 is the same as the conversion that is used for cmr12, but the glyphs in the two fonts are very different.

This customised cmexunicode10 font is included as part of the 'dvir' pacakge.

In the case of characters in the english alphabet, on Cairo-based graphics devices, things are again relatively straightforward. For example, the DVI character number 72 is converted to the R character value "\U0048", which maps to a character name H, which produces a glyph that draws an 'H' (in most fonts).

For characters outside the english alphabet, things are a little more complicated. For example, the DVI character number 33 with font cmr12 is converted to "\U0021", which maps to a character name exclam, which draws an exclamation glyph, but with font cmmi12 it is converted to "\U03C9", which maps to a character name omega, which draws a Greek omega glyph.

To produce a summation sign within a mathematical equation, the DVI font is cmex10, which gets switched to cmexunicode10, the DVI character number is 80, the R character value is "\U0050" (UNICODE for "P"), which maps to a character name P, which draws a summation sign glyph (because the character names have all been modified in the cmexunicode10 font).

## 5. Discussion

The 'dvir' package is in an early development stage. It has only been tested on Ubuntu systems, it only works with a subset of R graphics devices, and it only works with plain LaTeX documents.

The 'dvir' package is also very slow. It draws each character (and each filled rectangle) as a separate 'grid' grob.

Nevertheless, for this limited set of conditions, and assuming time is not critical, the 'dvir' package does produce full-quality TeX layout and fonts.

There are many ways in which the basic functionality of the 'dvir' package could be extended. Getting the package working on Windows would be big step forward, as would support for a wider range of graphics devices, especially the svg device. Extending the range of supported fonts would also be useful, particularly to fonts outside of the standard TeX Computer Modern fonts and/or to other font types like True Type and Open Type fonts. It would be interesting to look at extending the package to support multi-page DVI files and to design support for xxxi operations (TeX \special commands). For example, it might be possible to support the LaTeX xcolor package or the graphicx package for included graphics. Another interesting question would be how to combine the drawing of DVI output with normal 'grid' text output, with particular attention to aligning baselines.

### Related work

Apart from the "plotmath" facility and the 'tikzDevice' package mentioned in the Mathematical Equations in R Section, another TeX-related R package is the 'texPreview' package (Sidi and Polhamus, 2018). This package automates the generation of PDF, PNG, or SVG images from LaTeX code. It is then possible to import the resulting image into R and draw it, but the quality of the result is unlikely to be ideal because of scaling of raster images (in the case of PNG) or because of conversion to outlines rather than real fonts (in the case of vector images). Another package that works explicitly with DVI files is Duncan Murdoch's 'patchDVI' (Murdoch, 2015). The aim of that package is to assist with editing and debugging 'Sweave' (Leisch, 2002) and 'knitr' (Xie, 2015) documents by modifying the DVI file to allow links between the source document and the final output. It does not attempt to render the DVI file.

As demonstrated in one of the early examples, packages that generate LaTeX code are potentially useful for providing input to the grid.latex function in 'dvir'. Examples include 'xtable', and the latex function from the 'Hmisc' (Harrell Jr, 2017) package.

Outside of R, there is a module for the Python library matplotlib (Hunter, 2007) called dviread (The Matplotlib development team, 2018). This appears to take a similar approach to the 'dvir' package. It reads the raw DVI file and attempts to access the exact fonts and encodings to produce high-quality TeX output, though with similar limitations to 'dvir'. In some ways this is more like the 'tikzDevice' approach because the effect is applied to an entire plot at once, although it is closer to 'dvir' in the sense that the effect only applies to text labels within the plot.

## 6. Technical requirements

The examples and discussion in this document relate to version 0.1-1 of the 'dvir' package, version 0.3-4 of the 'hexView' package, and version 0.1.7.9001 of the 'gdtools' package (which is a fork of the original package).

This report was generated within a Docker container (see Resources section below).

## 7. Resources

• The raw source file for this report, a valid XML transformation of the source file, a 'knitr' document generated from the XML file, two R files and the bibtex file that are used to generate the table of contents and reference sections, two XSL files and an R file that are used to transform the XML to the 'knitr' document, and a Makefile that contains code for the other transformations and coordinates everything. These materials are also available on github.
• This report was generated within a Docker container. The Docker command to build the report is included in the Makefile above. The Docker image for the container is available from Docker Hub; alternatively, the image can be rebuilt from its Dockerfile.

## How to cite this document

Murrell, P. (2018). "Revisiting Mathematical Equations in R: the 'dvir' package" Technical Report 2018-08, Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland. [ bib ]

## 8. References

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The Matplotlib development team (2018). dviread. matplotlib module version 2.2.3. [ bib | .html ]
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Xie, Y. (2015). Dynamic Documents with R and knitr. Chapman and Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida, 2nd edition. ISBN 978-1498716963. [ bib | http ]