exams::tex2image failing to compile with no logs

Question

I'm trying to compile a R Markdown file that uses exam::tex2image to generate an image from a Latex equation.

Unfortunately the compilation fails, the error message talks about a log file which doesn't exist.

Source code:

---
output: 
  pdf_document:
    keep_tex: true
---

```{r 2sls, echo=FALSE, results="hide"}
exams::tex2image("2+2=4")
```

stdout:

❯ R -e "options(tinytex.verbose = TRUE);rmarkdown::render('README.Rmd', clean=F)"
> options(tinytex.verbose = TRUE);rmarkdown::render('README.Rmd', clean=F)


processing file: README.Rmd
  |..........................................                     |  67% (2sls)This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.25 (TeX Live 2023/Arch Linux) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
Quitting from lines 8-9 (README.Rmd) 
Error: LaTeX failed to compile tex2image.tex. See https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging for debugging tips. See tex2image.log for more info.
                                                                                                 
Execution halted

Did you try to debug the issue as digested in my response below? Did that work and, if so, yield anything that could help to resolve the problem? — Achim Zeileis, May 29 '23 at 01:53
Worked after reinstalling R. I have accepted your answer. Thanks! — robertspierre, May 29 '23 at 02:49

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 15 '23 at 20:20

Your code works correctly for me (with TeX Live 2022/Debian) so it is likely something in your LaTeX setup that is causing the problem, possibly a missing style file or something like that.

To debug the issue I would run the example interactively and set the tdir argument for the temporary directory:

exams::tex2image("2 + 2 = 4", tdir = "/path/to/tempdir/")

Note that the temporary directory should be empty before. Then tex2image() will create a temporary LaTeX file in the temporary directory and then run tinytex::latexmk() (or tools::texi2dvi()) on it. If there are problems you can also run LaTeX manually to produce the .log file or apply other debugging strategies.

exams::tex2image failing to compile with no logs

1 Answers1