rstudio/tinytex

Consider including pdfcrop in TinyTeX

riccardoporreca opened this issue · 4 comments

riccardoporreca commented

TL;DR

  • It would be great to make pdfcrop available as part of TinyTeX.
  • Otherwise, one could advise to use tinytex::tlmgr_install("pdfcrop") and make sure ghostscript is available not to rely on pdfcrop when developing R Markdown PDF reports that could be rendered using a TinyTeX installation, by forcing fig_crop: false in the YAML header.

This is a suggestion to address the following situation.

  • R Markdown enables cropping images by default for PDF output documents using pdfcrop (if installed).
  • pdfcrop is a very sensible way of achieving nicely-sized figures generated from R w/o explicitly playing with fig.width/fig.height chunk options.
  • pdfcrop is available (on Linux) as part of the TeX Live installation (in texlive-extra-utils, requiring an additional ~200MB for the installation1).
  • TinyTeX is a great asset and a natural choice for a light-weight LaTeX installation, especially in containerized environments (see e.g. rocker/verse). However, the lack of pdfcrop may cause extra effort and hiccups, especially when developing a PDF report based on a local TeX Live installation (affordable in terms of size), with the figures not being cropped once deployed.
  • Having a mixed TinyTeX + texlive-extra-utils is of course possible (and better than a full TeX Live installation in terms of total size), but the extra 200MB are a big overkill for just having pdfcrop.
  • Update: TinyTeX is such a great tool: one can install pdfcrop via tinytex::tlmgr_install("pdfcrop") (or directly via tlmgr install) ! (Requires ghostscript to work.)

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  1. docker run --rm rocker/r-ver:3.5.3 sh -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install --no-install-recommends texlive-extra-utils' => `After this operation, 233 MB of additional disk space will be used
yihui commented

Thanks for the suggestion! I could include pdfcrop in the default installation, but as you mentioned, the real tricky thing is how to install Ghostscript on different platforms. It is relatively easy for a specific platform, such as in rocker/verse---you can install any additional packages after the default installation of TinyTeX: https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker-versioned/blob/08ca130eaf2f517452b4d4fa65ac34842eaaafd0/verse/Dockerfile#L50

There are other packages that also require Ghostscript, such as epstopdf. I have tried to install it on macOS if Homebrew is available: https://github.com/yihui/tinytex/blob/45612516660c187b3e11bfee7d78ce2096ac454c/R/tlmgr.R#L111-L116

In short, having pdfcrop in the default installation is still a little far away from a complete working solution for cropping PDF figures automatically in R Markdown.

  • 👍2
yihui commented

BTW, I don't use Linux now, but I'm surprised that you have to install texlive-extra-utils in order to obtain Ghostscript. Isn't there a standalone package for Ghostscript? https://packages.ubuntu.com/ghostscript

riccardoporreca commented

Thanks a lot @yihui for your reply and the very useful hints / pointers. The more I look into TinyTeX the more I like it!

Indeed, the dependency on Ghostscript is something you probably don't want to handle as part of the default installation. The nice things is that e.g. pdfcrop itself crashes with a clear message about Ghostscript not being found, so if a user installed pdfcrop via tlmgr and try to use it, it would be clear what is missing.

Apologies for the confusion around texlive-extra-utils, I mentioned it as an alternative for the whole pdfcrop installation before realizing tlmgr could be used for this, and should have stroked it out as part of the Update (will do it now to keep things clear).

Would you think of a good place where the manual installation of pdfcrop on top of TinyTeX could be mentioned / documented (maybe the R Markdown guide)? I think expecting figures to be cropped is pretty standard when using R Markdown with PDF (hence the default img_crop: true), but with the default TinyTeX install this is silently ignored and can puzzle users. I am basically wondering how to help other users facing or preventing the sort of hiccups I encountered with it. Of course I hope at least this issue can help as a reference.

I will also follow up on your suggestion and propose to add pdfcrop to rocker/verse in the existing tlmgr install line.

yihui commented

Yes, we should absolutely document it more clearly in the R Markdown book you mentioned. Please feel free to hit the Edit button at the top and submit a pull request. Thank you!