Reproducible Example for nbconvert Windows and PDF Bug

This repo attempts to provide a minimal reproducible example for the bug reported in jupyter/nbconvert Issue #974 by using GitHub Actions.

Notes about environment setup

• nbconvert and pandoc are installed using miniconda
• the TeX distribution comes from TinyTeX, a popular cross-platform TeX distribution used by the R community
• additional dependencies required by nbconvert are manually installed with tlmgr using the install_latex_deps.sh and install_latex_deps.ps1 scripts

Environment for failed build (from logs):

• Microsoft Windows Server 2019
• Python 3.8.3
• nbconvert 5.6.1
• pandoc 2.10
• TeX Live 2020 via TinyTeX

Results

Build #5 demonstrates an example where ubuntu-latest and macos-latest pass as expected, but windows-latest fails. You can see the failed build log here: link

[NbConvertApp] Running xelatex 3 times: ['xelatex', '.\\notebook.tex', '-quiet']
[NbConvertApp] CRITICAL | x failed: xelatex .\notebook.tex -quiet
This is XeTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.999992 (TeX Live 2020/W32TeX) (preloaded format=xelatex)

 restricted \write18 enabled.

entering extended mode

! Undefined control sequence.

<*> .\notebook

              .tex -quiet

?

! Emergency stop.

<*> .\notebook

              .tex -quiet

No pages of output.

Transcript written on ?.

Artifacts from build #5 have been copied into artifacts/ for reference.

Note that the artifacts/windows-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook.tex file from Windows has Windows-style CRLF line endings. I converted it to Unix-style LF line endings (artifacts/windows-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook_lf.tex), and this appears to produce identical files to the Ubuntu and MacOS runs.

$ find artifacts -type f -exec md5sum {} \; | sort
03a09f34782ea7a18044f4a846eb753a  artifacts/macos-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook_files/the_notebook_1_1.png
03a09f34782ea7a18044f4a846eb753a  artifacts/ubuntu-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook_files/the_notebook_1_1.png
03a09f34782ea7a18044f4a846eb753a  artifacts/windows-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook_files/the_notebook_1_1.png
0c6e074242f45693b5691122aec3950e  artifacts/macos-latest-the_notebook.pdf
43aef34985d51c5fcae20efef3b33b19  artifacts/ubuntu-latest-the_notebook.pdf
5da10de1a8757c9fdde8f74dbabc8c77  artifacts/macos-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook.tex
5da10de1a8757c9fdde8f74dbabc8c77  artifacts/ubuntu-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook.tex
5da10de1a8757c9fdde8f74dbabc8c77  artifacts/windows-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook_lf.tex
e2d21840f02c1986fd71b3703fae6403  artifacts/windows-latest-the_notebook-latex/the_notebook.tex