Don’t Know Which LaTeX Package(s) to Install When Getting a LaTeX Error?

Colin said “what fresh hell is that” last September when he ran into a LaTeX error, which may look familiar to some of you:

! LaTeX Error: File `inconsolata.sty' not found.

Type X to quit or <RETURN> to proceed,
or enter new name. (Default extension: sty)

! Emergency stop.
<read *>

l.276 ^^M

!  ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produced!

If you use both the R package tinytex and the LaTeX distribution TinyTeX, it should be nearly impossible to run into this type of error, because tinytex will try to automatically install the missing LaTeX package (unless there is something wrong with your Internet connection).

Since this great hacker complained about this LaTeX error, I thought it might be useful to build a cloud service for general users to upload their LaTeX error log to find out which LaTeX package(s) to install, given that I had already done the work in tinytex.

Then I created a GitHub repo called latex-pass, which did not take me very long. The only thing that took me a little while was to figure out how to write comments to pull requests from AppVeyor. Anyway, you can upload an error log, a .tex file, or an .Rmd file to this repo, wait for one minute or two, and you will be notified the names of missing LaTeX packages.

Again, this is unlikely to be useful to R users who have installed tinytex and TinyTeX. A few people seem to have used it, although I’m not sure where they heard about this repo from.

To complete the story, Colin read my mind and discovered four days later that this repo was created because of his original tweet.

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