getLatexStrWidth: Obtain the Width of an Arbitrary LaTeX String...

Description

Obtain the Width of an Arbitrary LaTeX String This function calculates the width of a string as it would appear after being compiled by LaTeX.

Usage

getLatexStrWidth(texString, cex=1, face=1, engine=getOption("tikzDefaultEngine"))

Arguments

texString

An arbitrary string for which the width is to be calculated. May contain LaTeX markup.

cex

a real number that specifies a scaling factor that is to be applied to device output.

face

an integer in the range [1-5] that specifies the font face to use. See par for details.

engine

a string specifying which TeX engine to use. Possible values are 'pdftex' and 'xetex'. See the Unicode section of tikzDevice for details.

Value

widthThe width of texString in point size.

Details

This function is used internally by the tikz device for proper string placement in graphics. This function first checks to see if the width exists in a global or temporary string width dictionary (as define in options('tikzMetricsDictionary')) and if so will pull the width from there. If the dictionary does not exist then a temporary one for the current R session is created and the string width is calculated via a system call to latex. The calling of latex to calculate a string width is quit expensive and so we strongly recommend setting options('tikzMetricsDictionary') <- /path/to/dictionary to create a global dictionary.

Examples

Run this code

getLatexStrWidth('{\\tiny Hello \\LaTeX!}')