Googling around I found that I was not the first one to want this. There is this LaTeX package with this github repo. The package provides a new environment (python) within which you can write arbitrary Python code. The code is executed when the document is compiled and the output is inserted into the document.
I try it and it worked like a charm. It was even printing the traceback in red when there was an error in the script. You can do things like this:
\documentclass[a4paper]{book} \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} \usepackage{python} \begin{document} A simple example: \begin{python} print(2+3) \end{python} \vspace{1cm} Generating and displaying a figure: \begin{python} import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # evenly sampled time at 200ms intervals t = np.arange(0., 5., 0.2) # red dashes, blue squares and green triangles plt.plot(t, t, 'r--', t, t**2, 'bs', t, t**3, 'g^') plt.savefig('fig1.pdf', format='pdf') print(r""" \begin{figure}[htbp] \centering \includegraphics[width=12cm]{fig1.pdf} \caption{Here goes the caption} \label{fig:comparison} \end{figure} """) \end{python} \end{document}
and the output is:
But as the document grew, the LaTeX compilation time increased dramatically. The problem: Python scripts are executed on each compilation even if they have not changed.
I have forked the repo and hacked the code. In the new version, python scripts are only executed if needed. Using a helper python script (runpy.py) to avoid encoding differences between terminals, UTF-8 is fully supported. Additionally, you can select the python binary to use and choose to save auxiliary files in a subfolder to avoid poluting the main folder. These options are explained in the README. Check the code is in this github repo.
I am not really a LaTeX programmer and therefore I am sure that there a lot of things to be improved. Feel free to send patches, suggestions and comments.
