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

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Why don't you just output all the plot to a single file by opening
'pdf', doing the plots, 'dev.off()'.  Why do you need so many files
open?
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

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Jim Holtman
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What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
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

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______________________________________________
R-help at r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

|> 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

If you told us why you've closed the device, we'd understand what your
problem is.  Why can't you keep the same device open and as many pages
as you like will be appended before you do the dev.off() thing?  You
can change par settings for the individual pages if necessary.

[...]

HTH
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.   
   ___    Patrick Connolly   
 {~._.~}          		 Great minds discuss ideas    
 _( Y )_  	  	        Middle minds discuss events 
(:_~*~_:) 	       		 Small minds discuss people  
 (_)-(_)  	                           ..... Anon

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.
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Is there some reason you can't reverse the loops? Then you'd have
only one device open at a time.

for ( i in length(obj.list) ) {
     dev.set( device.list( j ) )
     for( j in iters) {
         # do plotting and other stuff for this list member
    }
     # close current device
 }

Sarah
Patrick,

The reason I'm having a problem is because R only allows a maximum of 64
devices to be open at one time. If it allowed more than that, I wouldn't
have a problem. One way to get around that problem would be if I could close
a device and then append to it later, but there doesn't seem to be a way to
do that. My code works something like the following:

iters <- 1:100
obj.list <- ( long list of complex objects, of which there are > 64 )
device.list <- (holds a reference to all postscript devices, one for each
object in obj.list)

for ( i in iters ) {
  for( j in length(obj.list) ) {
     dev.set( device.list( j ) )
     # do plotting and other stuff for this list member to the j-th file,
appending to what has
     # been plotted before now
  }
}
# close all devices

This code fails because I cannot have more than 64 devices at a time. If it
were possible, every time the inner loop is executed, to set the current
device to the one corresponding to that list member, append to the (possibly
non-empty) postscript file and then close the device at the end of the inner
loop, my problem would be solved. Can you figure out a way to do this?

Thanks,

Alex

Sarah Goslee
http://www.functionaldiversity.org