Using bookdown and outputting pdf.

Publishing Your Results
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Hi. I was instructed to use tinytex for pdf on a Macintosh. Didn't work. So I used MacTex, following the instructions here: Install R, RStudio, and TeX (Mac). That worked.

But when I moved to my main project directory from my little test area, once again I couldn't output pdf. It was trying to output _main.pdf and failing. I renamed _bookdown.yml and _output.yml to _bookdownxx.yml and _outputxx.yml. Then it worked.

This can't be the recommended way of outputting pdf in a bookdown project. What's going on?

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Unfortunately, it is hard to help you much with only this information.

What did not work ? TinyTeX can be installed from R (1.2 Install LaTeX (TinyTeX) for PDF reports | R Markdown Cookbook) and in other ways (GitHub - rstudio/tinytex-releases: Windows/macOS/Linux binaries and installation methods of TinyTeX). I something does not work at installation of after, then we should look into it. You can open an issue in the repo GitHub - rstudio/tinytex: A lightweight, cross-platform, portable, and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live
It is built and tested for Mac so it should work.

But when I moved to my main project directory from my little test area,

How did you moved your project ? You moved the source file ?

A bookdown project is a folder, best used within a RStudio project, and you need to have R opened in that working directory. Then you can build to pdf by using the bookdown::pdf_book() format.

once again I couldn't output pdf.

What was the issue ? Did you have a log or error message ?

I renamed _bookdown.yml and _output.yml to _bookdownxx.yml and _outputxx.yml. Then it worked.

How do you render the book ? Are you calling bookdown::render_book() when you are in a bookdown project, or using RStudio IDE buttons ?

This can't be the recommended way of outputting pdf in a bookdown project. What's going on?

No this is not.

Documentation is in the book and we have a Get Started section

We don't have any recent report of such issues. Sometimes, PDF rendering issues are from specificities in users' environment

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