I recently found out about Paul Murrell's excellent xdvir package that
renders LaTeX in a graphics device. I thought this would be useful and
put a wrapper around the latexGrob() function into rgl.
Testing it on Github workflows worked fine on Ubuntu and MacOS runners,
but failed on Windows. Here's a typical error message:
This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999997 (TeX Live 2025) (preloaded
format=xelatex)
restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
Error: LaTeX failed to compile
C:\Users\RUNNER~1\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp6TD7wY/working_dir\RtmpmitpVG\file130053037941.tex.
See https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging for debugging tips.
Execution halted
(taken from
https://github.com/dmurdoch/rgl/actions/runs/16861206133/job/47761646553).
After a long series of experiments, I think I found the cause: xdvir
creates a file in tempdir(), and passes it to lualatex or xelatex (along
with various command line options). If that file contains the
"RUNNER~1" directory, which is the 8.3 form of "runneradmin", the
compile fails.
I have a workaround for this: I setwd(tempdir()) and use the basename of
the temp file.
Another workaround that I tried doesn't work: normalizePath(tempfile())
generally does nothing, because normalizePath() won't modify a path that
doesn't exist. If I write to the tempfile() and then normalize the
name, that does work.
I think there are one or more bugs here that should be fixed. I'm just
not sure what they are.
Is it a bug in TeXLive 2025, that those programs won't accept short
names? Or has Windows deprecated them, and R shouldn't be producing
them? Is it a bug that tempfile() doesn't produce a normalized path?
Duncan Murdoch
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