How to add "\" or "{" into a tex file?

I am a newbie of Python and LaTex. Now I have designed a .tex file. Then I want use PyLaTex (version 1.0.0 )to generate this .tex file and compile it with xelatex .There are some questions confused me for a few days.I couldn’t get answers by myself ,nor the search engine. Please help me, thanks a lot.

• How to set the documentclass with some variables? Such as

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}

• How to add some text with \ or {} into the tex file? I tried doc.packages.append and doc.append, but both of them will change \ to \textbackslash{} and change { to \{ which make the tex compile fail. I added r'' or u'' didn’t work. I want to append some text into tex such as

\definecolor{ColorName}{RGB}{76,73,72}  
\setCJKmainfont{SimHei} 
\setCJKmonofont{KaiTi}  
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}

If I typed doc.packages.append(r'\definecolor{ColorName}{RGB}{76,73,72}') it will generate \textbackslash{}definecolor\{ColorName\}\{RGB\}\{76,73,72\}

• How to append \vspace and \hspace into a figure? To make the tex like

\begin{figure}[h!]
\vspace{17.634mm}\hspace*{54.314mm}
\includegraphics[width=10.3977cm]{title.jpg}
\end{figure}

• Where could I get more documents except https://jeltef.github.io/PyLaTeX/latest/index.html

Thanks a lot. PyLaTex helped me a lot , but I couldn’t get enough documents. Waiting for your reply.

[kriete]

Hey xiuyanduan, I am using pylatex since while and just saw this issue, maybe I can help you.

How to set the documentclass with some variables?

• You can define the document class by using the pylatex Options from pylatex.base_classes.command import Options and set the document class like this: doc.documentclass.options=Options('12pt', 'svgnames', 'final')

How to add some text with \ or {} into the tex file?

• I think your problem is that firstly python escapes the backslashes and pylatex also in some occurences. You can avoid this by following the basic example provided in the pylatex examples using the pylatex NoEscape function with the prefix r before your string.

See here e.g.: basic example here it’s used like this:

doc.append(NoEscape(r’\maketitle’))

In your case I would suggest you use doc.preamble.append(NoEscape(r'\definecolor{ColorName}{RGB}{76,73,72}'))

Note that you have to import the NoEscape definition first: from pylatex import NoEscape

How to append \vspace and \hspace into a figure?

• Using the python with command you are basically inside the figure environment and using doc.append(NoEscape(r'')) should do the trick (I guess)

with doc.create(Figure(position='htbp')) as plot:
    doc.append(NoEscape(r''))
    plt.plot(x,y)
    plot.add_plot(width=NoEscape(r'1\textwidth'))

Hope that helps to solve your problem. Let us know how this works out for you.

By the way, if you don’t do this already, you can let pylatex generate your pdf document by e.g. calling doc.generate_pdf(extra_compiler_args=‘–xelatex’)

Regards, Andreas

[JelteF]

@kriete thanks for replying, your solutions should work. Some slight aditions. Another option is to use a Command object, for the definecolor command instead of a raw string. This has as an advantage that is less error prone to typos as the latex code is generated. Also arguments are escaped by default so user input can safely be used. https://jeltef.github.io/PyLaTeX/latest/pylatex/pylatex.base_classes.command.html#pylatex.base_classes.command.Command

To set the options on the documentclass you can also pass in a Command object as the documentclass parameter for the Document. You can then set the options there.

The vspace and hspace question should probably not be done by adding an empty string. I think you meant this:

doc.append(NoEscape(r'\vspace{17.634mm}\hspace*{54.314mm}'))

Again, this can be done with a Command object.

Important to note for the xelatex solution is that this requires that latexmk is installed, which is highly advised as it compiles latex, biblatex and others as much as necessary. If you want to not use latexmk anyway you can simply use the compiler argument and set it to xelatex. (also, the argument is called compiler_args instead of extra_compiler_args)