sh: xelatex: command not found when opening bookdown-demo

[jrosen48]

Following the five steps in the Get Started section of bookdown (Xie, 2017):

1. Download the GitHub repository https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo as a Zip file, then unzip it locally.
2. Install the RStudio IDE. Note that you need a version higher than 1.0.0. Please download the latest version if your RStudio version is lower than 1.0.0.
3. Install the R package bookdown.
4. Open the bookdown-demo repository you downloaded in RStudio by clicking bookdown-demo.Rproj.
5. Open the R Markdown file index.Rmd and click the button Build Book on the Build tab of RStudio.

an error returned after step 5:

output file: bookdown-demo.knit.md

sh: xelatex: command not found
Error: Failed to compile bookdown-demo.tex.
Execution halted

Exited with status 1.

[jrosen48]

I downloaded and reinstalled MacTex-2016 and it worked fine now.

[avnerkantor]

I have the same problem (Ubuntu 16.10)

[yihui]

@avnerkantor Did you install xelatex?

[bitsandbricks]

Try this to install xelatex on Ubuntu and fix your issue:

sudo apt-get install texlive-xetex

[yihui]

@bitsandbricks I have been frustrated by existing LaTeX distributions on different platforms, so I created TinyTeX: #507 (comment)

[bitsandbricks]

@yihui TinyTex is awesome, if it had existed before I would have saved hours of my life spent dealing with LaTex packages and failed RMarkdown knits... thank you!!

[ShawnJW]

After installing xelatex on Ubuntu with
sudo apt-get install texlive-xetex

I still received errors and needed

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra
and
sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended

[yihui]

If anyone still has this problem, please see the instruction on installing TinyTeX at https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/installation.html You can also use Ubuntu's texlive-* packages if you don't mind figuring out which package(s) to install. TinyTeX should work automatically.