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MYaseen208
Asked: 2016-07-06 07:39:41 +0800 CST

texi2dvi with TeX 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2015) in R is not working

  • 772

In past I was using 

texi2dvi("ABC.tex", pdf = TRUE)

in R to produce pdf from tex. However, after using

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Now using 

texi2dvi("ABC.tex", pdf = TRUE)

throws the following error

Error in texi2dvi(file = file, pdf = TRUE, clean = clean, quiet = quiet,  : 
  Running 'texi2dvi' on 'ABC.tex' failed.
Messages:
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘Yaseen/XYZ’: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/texi2dvi: cannot create directory: Yaseen/XYZ

My directory name contains spaces too (I can not change because many my directories have spaces in their names).

Through surfing I came across this link which says:

To build the PDF documentation, you will need a version of TeX Live or texinfo that includes texi2dvi (BEWARE: recent TeX Live, and some texinfo RPMs, do NOT include texi2dvi).

My tex --version output is 

TeX 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2015)
kpathsea version 6.2.1
Copyright 2015 D.E. Knuth.
There is NO warranty.  Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the TeX copyright and
the Lesser GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING and the TeX source.
Primary author of TeX: D.E. Knuth.

Any help to figure out the problem will be highly appreciated. Thanks

Edited

My setwd() in R is

setwd(
  file.path(
    "/media"
    , "yaseen"
    , "D"
    , "Muhammad Yaseen"
  )
)

getwd()
[1] "/media/yaseen/D/Muhammad Yaseen"

and

texi2dvi("ABC.tex", pdf = TRUE)
latex

1 Answers

  1. The error message you posted suggests that the path you provided for the file doesn't exist. Does Yaseen/XYZ exist? if not, create it first and try again.

    If your directory names contain spaces, try escaping them using \ in the command:

    path/to\ my\ files/

    Or use quotes (" / '):

    "path/to my files/"

    If you're doing this from R, make sure you use \\ to ensure the escape character gets passed on:

    texi2dvi("/media/yaseen/D/Muhammad\\ Yaseen/ABC.tex", pdf = TRUE)

    Edit: note the documentation for this in R (?texi2dvi):

    There are various versions of the texi2dvi script on Unix-alikes and quite a number of bugs have been seen, some of which this R wrapper works around.

    One that was present with texi2dvi version 4.8 (as supplied on OS X) is that it will not work correctly for paths which contain spaces, nor if the absolute path to a file would contain spaces.

    This is obviously a dumb bug, so the best workaround is to avoid paths with spaces.

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