latex-... options not picked up?

[devmotion]

Bug description

Hej!

In a larger project, I would like to use my own latexmk pipeline because manually running latexmk with the LaTeX file generated by Quarto works successfully whereas compilation is unsuccessful when I try to generate the PDF with quarto and pdf-engine: latexmk. Based on the docs, I assumed I could opt out of Quarto's machinery by setting latex-auto-mk: false. However, changing this setting does seem to make a difference (as someone else had noticed before apparently: #819 (comment)). In contrast to other configurations, these options also don't show up in the pandoc/metadata output in the terminal.

So I tried to set some of the other latex-... options and they also did not seem to affect compilation. For instance, I played around with the following somewhat minimal example:

---
title: MWE
format:
  pdf:
    pdf-engine: latexmk
    pdf-engine-opt: '-verbose'
    latex-auto-mk: false
    latex-output-dir: "/home/david/quarto-mwe/"
---

A MWE for debugging the `latex-` options.

I rendered it by running

quarto render mwe.qmd --log-level=debug

in the terminal. Both with Quarto 1.2.335 and 1.3.34 (Fedora 37), the latex-... options do not change the output in the terminal and, e.g., regardless of the option latex-output-dir always a directory /tmp/... is used by latexmk.

Am I doing something wrong or do these options not work currently?

Checklist

• Please include a minimal, fully reproducible example in a single .qmd file? Please provide the whole file rather than the snippet you believe is causing the issue.
• Please format your issue so it is easier for us to read the bug report.
• Please document the RStudio IDE version you're running (if applicable), by providing the value displayed in the "About RStudio" main menu dialog?
• Please document the operating system you're running. If on Linux, please provide the specific distribution.

[cderv]

@dragonstyle is latex-output-dir config supposed to be working only with Quarto latexmk or not ? It seems from our code it is is, but not sure if it is an oversight or not. Thanks

[devmotion]

To be clear, for me latex-output-dir doesn't make a difference regardless of whether I use latex-auto-mk: true or latex-auto-mk: false.

[dragonstyle]

I believe that this is only an option for configuring the Quarto latex engine. If you're using the latexmk engine directly, you should use the engine options to configure it as you'd like.

[devmotion]

Thanks for this clarification!

This does not explain the following behaviour though, does it?

• latex-output-dir is not respected if latex-auto-mk: true (and neither if latex-auto-mk: false)
• a .latexmkrc file with $out_dir = "..."; is neither respected if latex-auto-mk: true nor if latex-auto-mk: false

So to summarize, to me it seems by setting pdf-engine: latexmk quarto always runs a default pipeline for latexmk, regardless of which options I set in quarto or in a .latexmkrc config file. Only pdf-engine-opt seems to be respected, this allows me e.g. to set -output-directory=....

[cderv]

I wonder if we could have some specific handling that would miss the .latexmkrc config...

We have pdf-engine-opt config that you could set though, like in pdf-engine-opt: -outdir=out shown in https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/pdf-engine.html#alternate-pdf-engines

Is this at least working ?

[devmotion]

Yes, as mentioned above pdf-engine-opt is respected and I can set e.g. the output directory with -output-directory=.... But all latex-... options do not seem to work - even if I use the Quarto pipeline with latex-auto-mk: true (which is the default anyway, as far as I understand). And it seems also latex-auto-mk: false does not have any effect.

It seems someone else made the same observation #819 (comment), so I think it should be possible to reproduce this behaviour.