[tinytex] Frequently Asked Questions | /tinytex/faq/

If you have too many packages to install, I guess the best way is to install them on another computer that's not behind the firewall, and copy TinyTeX to your working laptop: https://yihui.org/en/2018/08/tinytex-flash-drive/

If you only need to install one or two packages, you can download them from CTAN, and unzip the packages to the TinyTeX installation dir. The most common dir to put these packages is file.path(tinytex::tinytex_root(), 'texmf-dist', 'tex', 'latex').

Originally posted on 2020-02-11 15:13:42

Guest *luca birigazzi* @ 2020-02-11 15:34:41 originally posted:

thank you!

First, run this command in your terminal (or command window) to get the names of installed LaTeX packages:

 tlmgr info --list --only-installed --data name

Then reinstall TinyTeX, and use

tlmgr install 

followed by the package names (separated by spaces) to install the packages.

Originally posted on 2020-04-15 21:41:50

I'm investigating this issue right now. Please keep an eye on rstudio/tinytex#210 Thanks, and I'm sorry for the trouble!

Originally posted on 2020-05-14 03:03:09

I don't what the problem could be, but if tinytex::install_tinytex() doesn't work, you may try tinytex:::install_prebuilt().

Originally posted on 2020-07-04 18:18:57

It will be great if you could post the full original error message. Anyway, if you have difficulty in downloading TinyTeX.zip, you may download it using your web browser, and pass the path of the zip file to tinytex:::install_prebuilt() to install it.

Originally posted on 2021-08-19 02:44:22

What happens when you tinytex::install_tinytex()?

Originally posted on 2021-10-20 00:10:46

Guest *Giovanni Romano* @ 2021-10-20 10:05:15 originally posted:

R gives me this error:

tinytex::install_tinytex()

The directory /usr/local/bin is not writable. I recommend that you make it writable. See rstudio/tinytex#24 for more info.

apertura URL 'https://yihui.org/tinytex/TinyTeX-1.tgz'
apertura URL 'https://yihui.org/tinytex/TinyTeX-1.tgz'
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired

More details here: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html
curl performs SSL certificate verification by default, using a "bundle"
of Certificate Authority (CA) public keys (CA certs). If the default
bundle file isn't adequate, you can specify an alternate file
using the --cacert option.

If this HTTPS server uses a certificate signed by a CA represented in
the bundle, the certificate verification probably failed due to a
problem with the certificate (it might be expired, or the name might
not match the domain name in the URL).

If you'd like to turn off curl's verification of the certificate, use
the -k (or --insecure) option.
HTTPS-proxy has similar options --proxy-cacert and --proxy-insecure.

Errore in download.file(url, output, ..., method = method) :
'curl' call had nonzero exit status

In aggiunta: Messaggi di avvertimento:
1: In download.file(url, output, ..., method = method) :
URL 'https://yihui.org/tinytex/TinyTeX-1.tgz': lo status era 'Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates'

2: In download.file(url, output, ..., method = method) :
URL 'https://yihui.org/tinytex/TinyTeX-1.tgz': lo status era 'Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates'

You can try tinytex::install_tinytex(version = 'latest') instead.

Originally posted on 2021-10-20 13:20:11

Guest *Giovanni Romano* @ 2021-10-20 13:25:36 originally posted:

Thank you very much now everything is working, but now can I knit every document in pdf every time or before I have to call this line of code: tinytex::install_tinytex(version = 'latest') ?

No, this line of code only needs to run once. After you install TinyTeX, you are done. You don't need to reinstall it over and over again.

Originally posted on 2021-10-20 13:42:17

Guest *Giovanni Romano* @ 2021-10-27 13:00:16 originally posted:

Hi, sorry but now I'm working on an assignment, but I don't know which command R doesn't knit to pdf. Can you help me?

output file: Homework-assignment.knit.md

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode character − (U+2212)
(inputenc) not set up for use with LaTeX.

Try other LaTeX engines instead (e.g., xelatex) if you are using pdflatex. See https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/latex-unicode.html

Errore: LaTeX failed to compile Homework-assignment.tex. See https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging for debugging tips. See Homework-assignment.log for more info.

Esecuzione interrotta

Sorry, but I can't do anything about it. This file is from TeX Live, and you may contact them via the mailing list: https://www.tug.org/texlive/contribute.html

Originally posted on 2021-11-09 22:41:31

Please install the latest version of RStudio: rstudio/rmarkdown#1990

Originally posted on 2021-12-22 15:58:29

Unfortunately I don't think there is a robust solution to this problem. The complication comes from the large number of CTAN mirrors. Every year in early April when a new version of TeX Live is released, this problem will arise because it takes time (one or a few more days) for mirrors to be synced up. The mirror that you are currently using may or may not have gotten the latest version of TeX Live yet.

Back to your question, tinytex::tlmgr_update() should automatically detect if you have a too old version of TeX Live and emit a message if you do: https://github.com/yihui/tinytex/blob/c3a71c7/R/tlmgr.R#L223-L231 The message also tells you that you may have to wait for some time before you can tinytex::reinstall_tinytex().

Originally posted on 2022-04-14 03:54:02

Guest *Dawn Nekorchuk* @ 2022-04-18 16:42:07 originally posted:

Okay, thank you! Knowing it is in April was a big help. I've written a one-line tinytex reinstall script in R that I'll instruct my users to run every year as part of their set-up for the next season (which is after April). Close enough to automatic.

You can report this issue to https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions or https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues. I'm not the right person to help with the RStudio IDE issue, since I don't develop the IDE. Thanks!

Originally posted on 2022-09-12 04:21:25

Guest *Eric Mai* @ 2022-09-12 12:47:55 originally posted:

Thanks Yihui! Will do.

For the company environment, I'd recommend that you install the full TinyTeX unless you lack the 4Gb disk space: https://yihui.org/en/2022/05/tinytex-full/

With the version, the TinyTex-1 version would probably be enough for me. The question was rather how exactly do I install this on the reference machine so that all packages are then captured and included in the later msi installation?

I don't know how the MSI package is made, but TinyTeX is entirely portable. No matter where you put it on the reference machine, you can use it. You may see https://yihui.org/en/2018/08/tinytex-flash-drive/ for more info.

Hi Jeremy, I don't know the cause of the LaTeX error, but it seems you don't really have TinyTeX installed. You said ~/.TinyTeX was empty, so uninstall_tinytex() won't work (there is nothing to uninstall). If you want to use TinyTeX, you need to install it first: tinytex::install_tinytex().

I also get a similar error when trying to run tinytex::tlmgr_update(). It says that directory /var/lib/texmf/web2c is not writable (I assume this is where my TeXStudio is linked) even after I ran tinytex::tlmgr_install()

On Linux, TinyTeX should make symlinks from its installation directory (no matter where it is) to ~/bin. As long as ~/bin is in your PATH variable, both the tinytex R package and RStudio should find it. You can check Sys.getenv('PATH') in R or echo $PATH in your terminal.

If ~/bin is not in your PATH (normally it should be), you could symlink TinyTeX's executables to a directory in PATH, such as /usr/local/bin (this one is almost guaranteed to be present in PATH), but I don't quite recommend this approach unless you apt remove texlive-full from your system, otherwise you may have conflicts between TinyTeX and TeX Live.

cd ~/TinyTeX/bin/*  # assuming you installed TinyTeX to ~/TinyTeX; the default is ~/.TinyTeX
./tlmgr path remove  # in case symlinks have been made
./tlmgr option sys_bin /usr/local/bin
sudo ./tlmgr path add

Well then I'm not sure what the issue is. As you can see from the output below, ~/bin is the second directory in Sys.getenv('PATH') but when I run tinytex::uninstall_tinytex() right after, I get the root_dir error again.

> Sys.getenv('PATH')
[1] "/usr/bin:/home/jeremy/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/snap/bin:/usr/lib/rstudio/resources/app/bin/quarto/bin:/usr/lib/rstudio/resources/app/bin/postback"
> tinytex::uninstall_tinytex()
Error in root_dir(normalizePath(path), "..", "..", "..") : 
  /usr/share/texlive does not seem to be the root directory of TeX Live (no "bin/" dir under it)

Not sure if you have any suggestions other than removing both texlive-full and any tinytex-related folders and then reinstalling. If I do go that route, do you have a suggested order of installing? Should I do tinytex first and then try to link my TeXStudio?

Thanks for your help

Sorry, that code block didn't come out properly

Do you actually have any symlinks under ~/bin? If you installed TinyTeX successfully, there should be several symlinks under ~/bin.

You can install texlive-full and TinyTeX simultaneously, although it shouldn't be necessary. ~/bin has quite high precedence in PATH, so TinyTeX should be chosen when texlive-full is also installed.

Yep. It seems that folder is fully populated, there are a total of 58 files in there, including the links for latex, lualatex, pdflatex, and tlmgr. I tried to link my TexStudio to those symlinks (they were linked to symlinks in the /usr/bin/ folder) but it failed to compile a document since it was not able to find all the packages installed with texlive-full (I originally installed this with sudo apt install texlive-full). Is there a way that I can force TinyTex to link to the /usr/bin/ folder instead to see if that solves my problem?

The strange thing about the error message I'm getting is that the directory /usr/share/texlive that it is trying to find the bin/ folder in doesn't even show up in the list of Sys.getenv('PATH')

Is there a way that I can force TinyTex to link to the /usr/bin/ folder instead to see if that solves my problem?

Yes, I have told you how to do it in a previous reply: https://github.com/yihui/yihui.org/discussions/1358#discussioncomment-7777546

Yes, you did provide a solution but you recommended against it unless I uninstalled texlive. However, if I uninstall texlive, then wouldn't the symlinks in the /usr/bin/ folder be removed? So there wouldn't be any reason to try to link tinytex to that folder?

I appreciate the help and suggestions but there seems to be a major conflict on my machine between texlive and tinytex and since I do all of my writing in TexStudio, I will probably abandon the tinytex for now. I was really only interested in the programmatic CV aspect but I'm not even able to Knit the awesome-cv template right now.

After looking at your PATH variable agin, I think I understand the situation now:

/usr/bin:/home/jeremy/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:...

I don't know why /usr/bin appeared twice in your PATH (it's probably a problem of RStudio IDE). I don't have Ubuntu on my computer to test with, but I think texlive-full's symlinks are made to /usr/bin, which has higher precedence over ~/bin. Therefore tinytex cannot find TinyTeX (it detects texlive-full first).

For now, you can adjust your PATH via:

Sys.setenv(PATH = gsub('^/usr/bin:', '', Sys.getenv('PATH')))

In the mean time, I'll see if I can improve the detection of TinyTeX in the tinytex package.

Another solution is to uninstall texlive-full. I'm reasonably sure TinyTeX alone can work well for you. You don't need both, and Ubuntu's texlive package is often too old and hard to update (which is one of the reasons why we created TinyTeX).

Update: Actually if you don't change the default installation path of TinyTeX (~/.TinyTeX), it should be correctly detected, too. No need to tweak PATH or uninstall texlive.

The first caveat may not apply. I think BasicTex manages its own PATH: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/30c5b09cf49e884848c65ce96dcdcda288c28fa1/Casks/b/basictex.rb#L30 It probably doesn't write symlinks to /usr/local/bin. I have never tested it so I'm not entirely sure.

The second caveat depends on where tlmgr install installs packages for BasicTeX., which I don't know. If packages are installed to a place that Homebrew doesn't clean up, they may survive the update.

Thanks! I'm going to take a look to see what it actually does.

That problem might be transient. If you retry and it still doesn't work, you can try to set a different CTAN repository via tinytex::tlmgr_repo().

Yes. Anything that works with TeX Live should work with TinyTeX, too.