Adding a table of contents to PDF with R plots

Question

I\'m creating a larger number of plots in R and save them as PDF (using grDevices / pdf). Is there an easy way to add a (meta-data) table of contents to the PDF as it is created

Answer 1

You could create a first page using the names of your objects or plots as the arguments to text in columns.

plot(1:10,1:10, type="n", main ="Index", axes=FALSE,frame.plot=FALSE,xlab="")

text(1,10, "plot")
text(3,10, "page")
text(5,1:10, rev(1:10+1))
text(2,1:10, rev(letters[1:10]))

I cannot think of a way to generate a navigable TOC, but this option may be more pleasing and easier to integrate with Beamer-type displays. The Hmisc package function latex provides an interface to the Latex longtable package. My Latex-fu is weak but if yours is stronger, you could also divert the dvi code that is created for integration within other applications. I get an intermediate dvi file put in a temporary directory which then opens my dvi viewer and allows saving as pdf:

require(Hmisc)
?latex  # you will probably want to review this
latex(Plot_list<-data.frame(Plots=letters[1:10], Pages=2:11))