Diagnosing R package build warning: "LaTeX errors when creating PDF version"

Question

When building a package, I received the following warning:

* checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
This typically indicates Rd problems.

I have no idea how to even begin diagnosing this. Is there a tool that tells me what .Rd file the problem is in?

I get no warnings about any of my Rd files in the checking documentation step....

I use the `devtools` packages for this. I can't even imagine how hard package building will be without it. — Andrie, May 30 '12 at 16:08
@Andrie Now that I'm transitioning to dissertating full-time, one of my goals for the next few months is to invest in an optimal workflow. So I'm switching over to devtools soon, but haven't learnt it yet. :-( — Ari B. Friedman, May 30 '12 at 19:17
FWIW, I randomly started getting these errors, and after a couple days of trying to debug latex code and trying all sorts of fixes on the internet, I did a clean install of mactex and all the errors disappeared. — rawr, Dec 18 '14 at 15:23
actually I take that back. It has broken again and getting the same errors. Seems to be a [known issue](https://github.com/hadley/devtools/issues/63), but hadley's solution here works, ie, `R CMD build ./package` `R CMD check ./....tar.gz` from the command line — rawr, Dec 19 '14 at 05:22

score 74 · Accepted Answer · answered May 30 '12 at 16:13

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Try R CMD Rd2pdf mypackage to create the manual, and possibly also set the --no-clean option to keep the temporary files. This should allow you to debug the LaTeX code triggering the error.

answered May 30 '12 at 16:13

Dirk Eddelbuettel

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That did it. Thanks. Seems the error was due to a missing `inconsolata.sty` file, which I attribute to Ubuntu being horridly behind on its LaTeX updates. I'm installing TeX Live manually and that will hopefully help me stay up-to-date. – Ari B. Friedman May 30 '12 at 19:43
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That is not quite the correct conclusion in my book. `inconsolata.sty` is simply in another texlive fonts package: texlive-fonts-extra. And I seem to have added it the Suggests of the `r-base-dev` package as well. – Dirk Eddelbuettel May 30 '12 at 20:44
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Yes, that was not the most logical rant. When I looked for TexLive to install the package containing inconsolata, I found I didn't have texlive installed in Ubuntu. When I went to install it via the package repository, I realized it was 2+ years out-of-date. Then I turned into a giant ogre posting silly things across the internets. – Ari B. Friedman May 30 '12 at 20:56
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This `R CMD Rd2pdf mypackage --no-clean` worked great for me, too. Also, my problem was solved by installing the recommended fonts for tex-live, a meta-package called `texlive-collection-fontsrecommended`... In case you don't want to play whack-a-mole with missing fonts – Paul 'Joey' McMurdie Feb 22 '14 at 21:19
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In my case it was a missing `texi2dvi` required to build the document index; I corrected this with `sudo apt-get install texinfo` – dardisco Apr 02 '14 at 21:31
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I took me a while to figure out that once you have run `R CMD Rd2pdf mypackage --no-clean`, you can inspect the Latex file in `mypackage.Rcheck/mypackage-manual.tex` for errors. – Paul Rougieux Feb 15 '16 at 14:12
Thank you @dardisco, that solved it for me too (Linux Mint) – Dominic Comtois Feb 15 '19 at 10:14

Matt Bannert · Answer 2 · 2015-04-12T14:15:14.107

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Though @Dirk's answer also helped me to fix the problem I would like to add a bit which might especially help recent updaters. That is, people who haven't encountered other LaTeX / R troubles after the update to 3.1.3 yet. The problem is little bit more general than just building. For me, on OS X the problem was that R CMD Rd2pdf as well as the R CMD CHECK expected texi2dvi to be in /usr/local/bin while it was in /usr/bin. A symlink helped to fix the problem. On terminal type:

# to check whether the same issue exists for you
which texi2dvi
# if so
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/texi2dvi

Of course if the first line returns something else, you need to adapt the symlink here.

edited Apr 12 '15 at 14:15

answered Mar 26 '15 at 11:19

Matt Bannert

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Thanks! symlink solved the issue for me on OS X with R 3.1.3. In my case it worked with paths in inverted: ln -s /usr/bin/texi2dvi /usr/local/bin/texi2dvi – jburkhardt Mar 26 '15 at 15:11
@Johannes yes you're right. It's `ln -s source_file target file`. If you `cd` to the target destination first you only need to pass the source. – Matt Bannert Mar 26 '15 at 15:34
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For me on Linux Mint 17.1 (built on Ubuntu 14.04), I needed `texinfo`, not `texi2dvi`. Thanks for the tip and to [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17652698/texi2dvi-command-not-found) question for teaching me the analog! – MichaelChirico Sep 24 '15 at 00:27
I have: `which texi2dvi` > `/usr/local/bin/texi2dvi`. But I don't know if it is the cause of `/usr/local/bin/texi2dvi: makeindex failed`, `Error in running tools::texi2pdf()`. Any ideas how can I track the error? – Pablo Casas Jun 15 '20 at 03:05

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 11 '16 at 19:03

Concluding from the comments and from my own experience the problem often seems to be that some TeX fonts are missing, most often

inconsolata.sty and
upquote.sty

First you have to find the right directory where TeX fonts are stored - in my case this is:

C:\Program Files\R\R-3.3.0\share\texmf\tex\latex

Then you can download them here:

Just copy them to the respective folder and in many cases the problem will be solved (in my case too). This should work for all operating systems.

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 23 '18 at 22:07

...and another reason is that you haven't installed MikTex yet.

Download MikTex from here and follow the dialog prompts to install. I found the defaults to be reasonable and worked well for me.
Try to build your R package again. It should be OK now.

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 08 '22 at 13:13

In my case, I had no error when running devtools::check() nor devtools::document() but when running R CMD check mypackage_version.tar.gz I got an error:

* checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
This typically indicates Rd problems.
LaTeX errors found:
* checking PDF version of manual without hyperrefs or index ... ERROR

In this question in RStudio Community they point to a problem with LATEX installation. I have the LATEX installation suggested in R markdown cookbook: TinyTex. I fixed the issue by running in the R console

tinytex::latexmk(file = "../mypackage.Rcheck/mypackage-manual.tex")

This command automatically updated my LATEX installation so the output file mypackage-manual.pdf was created. After this, I did not get any other error related to PDF when running R CMD check:

* checking PDF version of manual ... OK
* DONE

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 08 '16 at 16:30

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If you are on Ubuntu just install Tex Live by this command: apt-get install texlive and restart Rstudo if you use it.

answered Apr 08 '16 at 16:30

koralgooll

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sudo apt install texlive-binaries – Ferroao Jun 06 '23 at 17:41

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Jan 03 '23 at 18:53

First, @dirk-eddelbuettel's approach in the current question identified the missing tex package (which was "makeindex" in my case).

system("R CMD Rd2pdf --no-preview --output=./documentation-peek.pdf ." )

# ... <omitted pages of output> ...
# Warning in sys2(makeindex, shQuote(idxfile)) : '"makeindex"' not found
# Error in texi2dvi(file = file, pdf = TRUE, clean = clean, quiet = quiet,  : 
#    unable to run 'makeindex' on 'Rd2.idx'
# Error in running tools::texi2pdf()

Then @pedro-lima's answer in https://stackoverflow.com/a/69968791/1082435 worked for my specific case.

tinytex::tlmgr_install("makeindex")

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Jan 27 '23 at 13:08

Oftentimes this error occur because of Unicode characters in the package. In this cases, the error message might look like this.

See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
! Package inputenc Error: Unicode character  (U+009D)
(inputenc)                not set up for use with LaTeX.

You can find any Unicode characters in your package using tools::showNonASCIIfile(). Here's a simple way to check for these characters in your functions and documentation:

# functions
functions <- list.files(path = './R', all.files = T, recursive = T, full.names = T)
lapply(X=functions, FUN = tools::showNonASCIIfile)

# documentation
docs <- list.files(path = './man', all.files = T, recursive = T, full.names = T)
lapply(X=docs, FUN = tools::showNonASCIIfile)

Diagnosing R package build warning: "LaTeX errors when creating PDF version"

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