Preview builds site fine but render and publish fail

[AustenLamacraft]

I'm finding that preview works great: I have HTML in _book and it looks great. But then render and publish (which presumably calls render) both try and do something with xelatex and then fail, producing an incomplete pdf in the process.

I'm not sure what's going on. Why does render do this when preview makes HTML perfectly OK? Any help would be great!

[cderv]

To what format are you rendering ? What is in your _quarto.yml ?

quarto render will by default render to all format. Publish will do too. See here: https://quarto.org/docs/books/#publishing

Are you able to render you book project to PDF ?
quarto render --to pdf ? This could be failling for several reasons depending for example on the LaTeX environment you have installed, and LaTeX packages available.

Without more information, it will be hard to help further.

[AustenLamacraft]

Ah OK, thanks. I want to render to html only (for now) so I guess I should do quarto render --to html? But I was hoping to use quarto publish to publish directly to Netlify without Quarto trying to make a PDF. Rendering then pushing to GH and then serving Netlify out of _book is OK though

[cscheid]

You can use project profiles in the quarto publish command, and project profiles allow you to choose different formats.

$ quarto publish --help

  Usage:   quarto publish [provider] [path]
...

  Options:

    -h, --help              - Show this help.
...
    --profile               - Active project profile(s)

  Commands:

    help  [command]  - Show this help or the help of a sub-command.

  Examples:

    Publish project (prompt for provider):  quarto publish
...

[AustenLamacraft]

Thanks! I think I've got it now. I had format: pdf specified in my _quarto.yml so I understand now that it builds a pdf in that case even if I'm just using quarto publish.