[R] Is there some way to append to a pdf after its device has been closed?

[Stephan Kolassa]

Hi Alex,

you can have R execute OS commands using system(), perhaps you can call 
pdfmerge that way.

Or (admittedly less elegantly), you can use LaTeX with the pdfpages 
package, either using Sweave or system(pdflatex ...).

Good luck,
Stephan


Alex Pine schrieb:
> Hello all,
> 
> My question has to do with writing to pdf/ps files. Currently, my R program
> requires 100+ pdf devices to be open, which is over the limit of 64 devices
> that can be open at the same time, causing R to throw an exception. My
> problem could be solved if I could append to a pdf file after its initial
> device has been closed, but so far I haven't been able to figure out a way
> to do that. If one calls pdf(file="myfile"), and "myfile" already exists, it
> will be overwritten. Is there any way that I can make the pdf() function
> append to the existing file instead? And if not, is there any way to call a
> program like pdfmerge ( http://microtronyx.com/pdfmerge/ ) from inside R
> code? I know I could simply write to a different pdf file every time I would
> otherwise do an append and then merge those files once my R program has
> completed, but in my case that would lead to the creation of literally
> thousands of pdf files before I merged them all together, and I would like
> to avoid that if possible.
> 
> Thank you for any help you can give,
> 
> Alex
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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