quarto render quarto book to pdf

[xx02al]

I'm still on my way to become better more familiar with positron. Recently I realized that I end up with an error when I do quarto render (which includes pdf) on a quarto book project in the terminal. Rendering to html works fine, in RStudio both html and pdf work fine. Kind or not, before I invest more time, I wanted to ask if there is already a clear error on my side based on this short description and/or if others observe something similar? How does it work correctly?

[juliasilge]

What happens if you do quarto install tinytex as outlined here?
https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/pdf-basics.html#prerequisites
Does that solve the problem?

Seems likely that RStudio is bundling some prerequisites for PDF building that Positron is not yet.

[xx02al]

It asked me whether I want to update my current installation, what I agreed on. As far as I can judge this then went well. I still end in the same scenario. Does this help figure out what I am doing wrong: ERROR: NotFound ... "C\Program Files\Positron\resources\app\quarto\share\formats\pdf\pandoc\before-bib.tex"!? As I saw then, the same error appears when rendering a "simple" quarto doc to pdf. This might be more helpful, as TinyTeX is obviously not detected globally in positron.
Honestly, I don't really understand what is meant by quarto install tinytex --update-path in the documentation - can it be that quarto can recognize TinyTeX in RStudio, but not in positron (even if TinyTeX was updated from there)? Should I try quarto install tinytex --update-path or am I doing something wrong?

[juliasilge]

I don't think you're doing anything wrong @xx02al, no. I think what is happening is that Positron is bundling Quarto but not a PDF engine such as tinytex.

What we need to do is bundle tinytex or similar along with Quarto, similarly to how RStudio bundles a PDF engine.

What you need to do as a workaround for now to get unstuck is to get a version of Quarto installed that knows about a PDF engine such as tinytex. I think what I would do in your situation is close Positron, install Quarto totally fresh, do quarto install tinytex, and then try again with your simple Quarto doc to see if it is all set up correctly. Please let us know if you can't get unstuck!

[juliasilge]

I opened #5553 to track the work we need to do to get this working. Thank you for the report! 🙌

[xx02al]

Thank you @juliasilge. Interesting. I have now installed the latest version of quarto (1.6.39; which I was going to do these days anyway) and with this one rendering to pdf (that is not built from typst) works, both "simple" quarto docs and books. Before updating, I had positron 2024.12.0-41 and the quarto version must have been 1.5.55 or 1.5.57.
I then tried things out on a second device, also here up until then, rendering to pdf worked in RStudio and the error described appeared in positron. I can confirm also quarto install tinytex with a subsequent positron restart is required after updating to quarto 1.6.39.
I think it makes sense you have opened #5553.