[R] adding "Page X of XX" to PDFs

[Ben Bolker]

    Sorry, jumped into the thread too late. (On the other hand, once the 
document gets complicated enough, it may be worth it in the long run to 
convert to something that actually has a document-generating back-end, 
rather than reinventing everything from scratch ...)

On 2023-12-02 2:03 p.m., Jeff Newmiller via R-help wrote:
> He clearly stated he was using the pdf() graphics device.
> 
> On December 2, 2023 10:36:44 AM PST, Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com> wrote:
>>   It's still not entirely clear to me what framework you're using to generate the PDF, but if it's rmarkdown/Rnw (Sweave)/Quarto-based, then as far as I know all of those frameworks use LaTeX as the last step in the script-to-PDF pipeline, and allow the inclusion of arbitrary LaTeX code, so the 'lastpage' package would do this for you:
>>
>> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70343001/how-to-show-the-total-number-of-pages-in-a-pdf-via-the-rmarkdown-i-e-display
>>
>> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/227/how-can-i-add-page-of-on-my-document
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2023-12-02 12:23 p.m., Ebert,Timothy Aaron wrote:
>>> Would this work in general? Say I have a document with figures, special equations, text, and tables. The text and tables are relatively easy. The figures would need a conversion from pixels to lines, and the equations maybe printed out, counted as a figure, and then added to the line count. It would also be tricky if a title line was at 32 point font and the text at 12, and the more complex the formatting the harder to deal with rows as related to page size.
>>>
>>> Thankfully I do not think I will have to do this, so the question is for theoretical interest on my part (at least for now).
>>>
>>> Tim
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: R-help <r-help-bounces using r-project.org> On Behalf Of Jeff Newmiller via R-help
>>> Sent: Saturday, December 2, 2023 11:46 AM
>>> To: r-help using r-project.org
>>> Subject: Re: [R] adding "Page X of XX" to PDFs
>>>
>>> [External Email]
>>>
>>> One of the most fundamental characteristics of R programming is the use of data frames of column vectors, and one of the very first challenges I had as a then-Perl-programmer was coming to grips with the fact that unknown-length CSV files would be read completely into memory as rows and once the entire CSV was in memory it would be transposed into column vectors. I was resistant to this philosophy at first, but the advantages in computation speed and simplicity eventually won me over.
>>>
>>> I would say that if you want to know how many pages you are going to produce with R, then you are going to have to count them before you create them. Building a dataframe that describes (in terms of parameters to be passed to a page-generating function in each row) what you are going to put on each page before you actually print it can make this pre-counting problem trivial, and the code that does the printing is likely to be more modular and testable as well.
>>>
>>> On December 1, 2023 12:53:25 PM PST, Dennis Fisher <fisher using plessthan.com> wrote:
>>>> OS X
>>>> R 4.3.1
>>>>
>>>> Colleagues
>>>>
>>>> I often create multipage PDFs [pdf()] in which the text "Page X" appears in the margin.  These PDFs are created automatically using a massive R script.
>>>>
>>>> One of my clients requested that I change this to:
>>>>         Page X of XX
>>>> where XX is the total number of pages.
>>>>
>>>> I don't know the number of expected pages so I can't think of any clever way to do this.  I suppose that I could create the PDF, find out the number of pages, then have a second pass in which the R script was fed the number of pages.  However, there is one disadvantage to this -- the original PDF contains a timestamp on each page -- the new version would have a different timestamp -- so I would prefer to not use this approach.
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone thought of some terribly clever way to solve this problem?
>>>>
>>>> Dennis
>>>>
>>>> Dennis Fisher MD
>>>> P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
>>>> Phone / Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
>>>> http://www.plessthan.com/
>>>>
>>>> ______________________________________________
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.
>>>
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>>> ______________________________________________
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>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> 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.
>