'pcrr8t' not found - install 'courier' by default? (CentOS)

[kenahoo]

I recently created a CentOS Docker image and performed the following:

Rscript -e 'install.packages("tinytex")'
yum install -y perl perl-Digest-MD5
Rscript -e 'tinytex::install_tinytex()'
~/.TinyTeX/bin/*/tlmgr option sys_bin /usr/local/bin && ~/.TinyTeX/bin/*/tlmgr path add

The DESCRIPTION file includes the following fields:

Author: Alice B <alice.b@example.com>
Maintainer: Chad D <chad.d@example.com>

When I build a package source tarball and run R CMD check example_0.32.tar.gz on it, it fails to build the doc PDFs, with an error similar to the Font T1/pcr/m/n/12=pcrr8t at 12.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found shown in issue #300. The error message seems to indicate that it's trying to use that font to render the above email addresses.

Doing Rscript -e 'tinytex::tlmgr_install("courier")' solves the problem and the R CMD check command thus succeeds. So I do have a perfectly fine workaround - I'm not asking for any help, just trying to inform the TinyTeX team of an issue they might want to consider.

My question: would it be reasonable to change TinyTeX to include courier in the base install? Reasons in favor:

1. Existing behavior seems to contradict the "R users won’t need to do anything" mantra of TinyTeX
2. Doing the identical steps on an Ubuntu image doesn't have a problem, R CMD check succeeds fine without installing courier manually
   Reasons against:
3. Obviously we want to keep TinyTeX small

Or is there some other solution that would be better?

Apologies if I've misunderstood the issue - I'm always a little befuddled in TeX land.

> xfun::session_info('tinytex')
R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: CentOS Linux 7 (Core)

Locale: C

Package version:
  grDevices_3.6.3 graphics_3.6.3  stats_3.6.3     tinytex_0.33   
  tools_3.6.3     utils_3.6.3     xfun_0.25      

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Please note - I have explicitly NOT upgraded to the latest version of R, because this is on a build server where we let the user choose the version of R they need to run against.

[yihui]

When you run into LaTeX errors, you can pass the error log to tinytex::parse_packages() to figure out the missing packages (https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/install-latex-pkgs.html):

> tinytex::parse_packages(text = "! Font T1/pcr/m/n/12=pcrr8t at 12.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found")
tlmgr search --file --global '/pcrr8t(-(Bold|Italic|Regular).*)?[.](tfm|afm|mf|otf|ttf)'
[1] "courier"

Indeed, the most important reason against including additional packages in TinyTeX is to keep the size small.

> tinytex::tl_sizes(pkgs = 'courier')
tlmgr info --list --only-installed --data name,size courier
The total size is 1.1 Mb
  package    size size_h
1 courier 1191936 1.1 Mb

I receive requests for including certain packages in the default installation from time to time (e.g., just yesterday #322). It's always a tough decision to make. For anyone who does not care too much about the package size, you can install a variant of TinyTeX:

tinytex:::install_prebuilt('TinyTeX')

This is probably the easiest solution.

Existing behavior seems to contradict the "R users won’t need to do anything" mantra of TinyTeX

I didn't count R package developers here. Developers may need to install a few additional packages (#135). BTW, there is possibility to make base R work with TinyTeX (#292), but it will require R core's support.

[kenahoo]

Thanks - lots of good options here. I appreciate the clarification about package developers vs. other R users.