Pdflatex for windows

Question

Does anyone know how to convert .tex files to .pdf in windows? I tried cygwin but it said the command "pdflatex" was not recognised

Thanks Philip

score 36 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 28 '11 at 09:34

36

There's no reason to complicate things with Cygwin. Go download and install a TeX distribution for Windows - I personally use TeX Live, but various other distributions are available, such as MikTeX or W32TeX.

If you want to use UTF-8 for your bibliography, and you're using BibTeX, I recommend using bibtexu instead of the regular bibtex (since bibtex doesn't actually support UTF-8). There's a download on the W32TeX site.

edited Jul 28 '11 at 09:34

Alex

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answered May 26 '10 at 16:44

Michael Madsen

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I've used MikTeX and it works great. However I've tried to install it three times over the years and only once did it actually work. I was not smart enough (or motivated enough) to figure out why the not-working installs did not work. – dash-tom-bang May 26 '10 at 16:51
Yes, installing used to be kind of difficult. Thankfully, Portable MikTeX now exists (http://miktex.org/portable/about). It's intended to be run from a USB stick that you carry around with you, but as a side effect it is also utterly trivial to install and works just as well as the older method. – Kilian Foth May 26 '10 at 17:12
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I tried a couple of hours installing TeX Live in Windows 7, but got all kinds of errors, gave up, and installed MikTeX (the regular 64-bit version) easily. – Seppo Enarvi Apr 19 '13 at 11:38
I disagree that installing software using Cygwin's package manager is complicating things. It actually makes the whole system more reproductible, like good distros do. I always highly recommend using Cygwin over messy native windows ports, for a better overall UNIX workflow. – Johan Boulé Sep 16 '19 at 09:43
FYI: TeX Live worked fine at the 1st try for Winwdows 10. – JCarlosR Apr 29 '20 at 16:05

Éibhear · Answer 2 · 2014-07-14T15:09:22.797

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If you need to stick with cygwin, install texlive and texlive-collection-latex

edited Jul 14 '14 at 15:09

answered Jul 14 '14 at 14:34

Éibhear

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I have those packages installed, yet I have the same problem. – Darius Bacon Oct 16 '14 at 20:04
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After installing `texlive-collection-latex`, it makes `pdflatex` available in the command line, but pandoc still complains about `pdflatex` not existing. – CMCDragonkai Oct 26 '15 at 18:54
@CMCDragonkai [This](http://superuser.com/a/1053281/) answer on superuser should probably solve that problem – tjalling Jan 04 '17 at 15:20

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 17 '15 at 16:28

The following command worked for me, under cygwin. I installed pandoc 1.13.2 and MiKTeX 2.9.5105 64-bit. Then I ran:

pandoc -s \
--latex-engine='C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\x64\pdflatex.exe'  \
-f markdown_github -t latex \
"my-file.md" -o "my-file.pdf"

The key here is that I gave the full path for MiKText's pdflatex.exe in the --latex-engine key, in quotes, using the windows path (as the pandoc I installed is the windows pandoc, it requires windows-style paths to find resources).

I used -f markdown_github because of the file format of my-file.md

I used -t latext but that's optional AFAIK.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 01 '13 at 02:10

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Installing tetex(and optionally tetex-extra) package in Cygwin worked for me.

answered Jun 01 '13 at 02:10

Wei Shi

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 06 '19 at 12:54

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MikTex and texify work for me under plain Windows.

answered Dec 06 '19 at 12:54

Terrence Brannon

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Pdflatex for windows

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