ggsource

Recover source code from exported PDFs. Use ggsource::ggsave instead of ggplot2::ggsave, and you can use ggsource::ggsource to quickly re-open whatever file was used to generate the plot in Rstudio.

ggsource_example.mp4

🛠️ Installation

devtools::install_github("Chris1221/ggsource")
library(ggsource)

Note: The package intentionally masks ggplot2::ggsave. There's no reason to use ggplot2::ggsave if you're using ggsource, as the export functionality is the same and, on error, ggsource defaults to ggplot2::ggsave anyway.

You must also install ExifTool if it not already installed on your system. See here for how to do that.

📊 Usage

The default way of using ggsource is within RStudio. You won't need to specify any additional arguments, and ggsource::ggsave will function as a drop in replacement of ggplot2::ggsave with the additional benefit of being able to use ggsource::ggsource to re-open the file.

However, you can also customise the package to your particular set up, whether or not it revolves around the rstudioapi.

Option 1: Within RStudio

Open a file (my_plot.R) in RStudio and create a plot. Save it using ggsource::ggsave (which will automatically mask ggplot2::ggsave).

my_plot.R:

library(ggplot2)
p = ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = class)) + 
  geom_point()

ggsave("my_plot.pdf", p)

Now at any point in the future, you can re-open my_plot.R with ggsource.

ggsource("my_plot.pdf")

This will open my_plot.R in RStudio.

Option 2: Outside of RStudio

ggsource::ggsave uses the rstudioapi to automatically detect the open file path. To override this, you can specify the scriptname (or arbitrary string, ggsource::ggsave doesn't care) that you want to save within the PDF. ggsource::ggsource will then just return the path that you gave it in the first place.

ggsave("my_plot.pdf", p, scriptname = "my_plot.R")
ggsource("my_plot.pdf", interactive = FALSE)

Will return my_plot.R.

❓ FAQ

How does this work?

PDF is a very flexible document format. It supports the addition of arbitrary tags that can contain any kind of metadata. We define a new meta tag that contains the name of the file currently open in RStudio.

Will this work with PNG / TIFF / JPG?

No. Only PDF.

ExifTool is not installing correctly, can you help?

No. There is extensive documentation on how to install the program here.