--pdf-engine full path of the engine not working

[priiduonu]

According to the documentation:

--pdf-engine=pdflatex|lualatex|xelatex|wkhtmltopdf|weasyprint|prince|context|pdfroff

If the engine is not in your PATH, the full path of the engine may be specified here.

pandoc README.md -o out.pdf --pdf-engine=/usr/bin/xelatex
pdf-engine /usr/bin/xelatex not known

without full path it works:

pandoc README.md -o out.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex

pandoc version used:

pandoc -v
pandoc 2.2.1
Compiled with pandoc-types 1.17.4.2, texmath 0.11, skylighting 0.7.0.2

It was working (with and without full path) in version 1.19.1
/usr/bin/xelatex exists and is executable.

[mb21]

Indeed, I believe this was introduces by 582cb4b, specifically the deletion of takeBaseName...

[gandalfsaxe]

I'm also having this issue.

On Windows 10, pandoc 2.2.1:

pandoc --pdf-engine=L:\portable\miktex-portable-2.9.6753\texmfs\install\miktex\bin\pdflatex.exe test.tex -o test.pdf

Gives me:

pdf-engine L:\portable\miktex-portable-2.9.6753\texmfs\install\miktex\bin\pdflatex.exe not known

However just launching L:\portable\miktex-portable-2.9.6753\texmfs\install\miktex\bin\pdflatex.exe works fine. Any suggestions?

[gandalfsaxe]

Could be because the fix is not in latest release (2.2.1) yet?

EDIT: I assume it is. Will try and compile the source myself.

EDIT2: Can confirm latest source works 👍

[jgm]

Correct. This is fixed in HEAD, but not in a release. Gandalf Saxe <notifications@github.com> writes:

…

Could be because the fix is not in latest release (2.2.1) yet? -- You are receiving this because you modified the open/close state. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #4681 (comment)

[pciavald]

I'm still having the issue with pandoc 2.3.1 on macOS 10.13 with spaces in paths.

not working :

$ pandoc --pdf-engine=/Users/user/Library/Application\ Support/app/xelatex
$ pandoc --pdf-engine="/Users/user/Library/Application Support/app/xelatex"

working :

$ pandoc --pdf-engine=/Users/user/Desktop/xelatex
$ /Users/user/Library/Application\ Support/app/xelatex

[jgm]

Try

…

--pdf-engine="/Users/user/Library/Application\ Support/app/xelatex"

[pciavald]

I've just tried that again, it does not work. I noticed that adding " around the path makes the engine unrecognizable to pandoc (pdf-engine must be one of ...), so for instance

$ pandoc --pdf-engine="/Users/user/Desktop/xelatex"

doesn't work either, while it works without quotes.

[mb21]

@pciavald what pandoc version are you on? works for me on pandoc 2.3

[pciavald]

My bad, my path problem is actually not lying in pandoc but in nodejs' child_process.spawn which did not handle arguments as I expected, and also seemingly a problem in XeLaTeX/TeXLive. If anyone comes here experiencing a problem to spawn pandoc with a full-path pdf engine, this did it the trick for me :

let child = spawn(`"${pandoc}"`, [
            `"${contentPath}"`,
            `--output="${outputPath}"`,
            `--template="${headerPath}"`,
            `--pdf-engine="${pdfEngine}"`,
          ], { shell: true })

the shell: true option launches pandoc with sh -c '"path/to/pandoc" "path/to/content.md" --output="path/to/output.pdf" --pdf-engine="path/to/engine"' instead of separating arguments and somewhat changing the quotes / escape sequences.

I'm building a text editor around pandoc, everything works on linux but on Mac it's a bit more complex seemingly due to spaces in paths. In this log you can see that pandoc successfully launches XeLaTeX but there's a path problem somewhere, accessing the "Application Support" folder :

sh: /Users/pciavald/Library/Application: No such file or directory
sh: /Users/pciavald/Library/Application: No such file or directory
Error producing PDF.
This is XeTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.99999 (TeX Live 2018) (preloaded format=xelatex 2018.10.12)  12 OCT 2018 22:25

Here's the TeXLive installation profile used, where we can see that paths have a space. I tried "/quoting/the path/" but it ends up installing "path/to the/folder"/resource and I tried escaping the paths without quotes and it results in /creating\\\ wrong/folders.

Trying XeLaTeX standalone also does not work with the same error, which confirms pandoc is not the cause. At this stage i had linked "Application Support" to "Application" in the same directory to try and trick the software into the right path, resulting in

sh: /Users/pciavald/Library/Application: is a directory

If you have any idea why this may be happening, i'd be glad to hear. Tried IRC freenode#latex without luck for now. Sorry for wrong issue digging, and thank you for maintaining Pandoc it's a wonderful tool.

[jgm]

@pciavald you may need to both double-quote and escape spaces:

--output="/path/with\ spaces/myfile\ with\ spaces.txt"

[archonic]

Is this fix still unreleased? I'm running pandoc 2.7.2 and getting pdf-engine must be one of wkhtmltopdf, weasyprint, prince, pdflatex, lualatex, xelatex, latexmk, tectonic, pdfroff, context when specifying a valid path.

If I'm unable to specify the path without building from source, then I'm wondering what engine I could use with the pandoc/latex docker image. I have a multistage build and the path ends up being /usr/bin/texlive/bin/x86_64-linuxmusl/latex. Is it possible to just alias that path as one of the engine names?

Update: Figured it out. Added RUN ln -s /usr/bin/texlive/bin/x86_64-linuxmusl/latex /usr/bin/pdflatex to my Dockerfile and all is well.

[wizpresso-steve-cy-fan]

Please reopen this issue, which is exist in the following version:

pandoc.exe 2.19.2
Compiled with pandoc-types 1.22.2.1, texmath 0.12.5.2, skylighting 0.13,
citeproc 0.8.0.1, ipynb 0.2, hslua 2.2.1
Scripting engine: Lua 5.4
User data directory: C:\Users\SteveFan\AppData\Roaming\pandoc
Copyright (C) 2006-2022 John MacFarlane. Web:  https://pandoc.org
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is no
warranty, not even for merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

[wizpresso-steve-cy-fan]

This issue happens if you want to use MikTex in Windows, but they renamed everything to have miktex- prefix (so I need to use miktex-pdftex, but it is not accepted

[tarleb]

@wizpresso-steve-cy-fan that should best go into a separate issue. Please open a new one for this.