Using TinyTeX from a Flash Drive

One nice fact about TinyTeX, the custom LaTeX distribution I created last year, is that once you install it, it is just a self-contained folder that can be moved elsewhere, even across computers of the same operating system. That is what “portable” means.

Yesterday I pushed a new version (v0.8) of the R package tinytex to CRAN mainly to address the issue of using TinyTeX from a portable device such as a flash drive. I added two new functions in this version:

1. tinytex::copy_tinytex() copies your existing TinyTeX installation to another location, such as your flash drive or a Dropbox folder (this could take a minute or two depending on the I/O speed of your devices). Of course, this means you have installed TinyTeX before (e.g., via tinytex::install_tinytex()). By default, it will pop up a dialog box asking you to choose the destination folder to copy to, if you don’t want to explicitly provide a path like:

   tinytex::copy_tinytex('E:/Software/')
   

2. tinytex::use_tinytex() asks you the location of TinyTeX, so that tinytex can find it later when compiling LaTeX documents. By default, it also pops up a dialog asking you to choose the TinyTeX folder, which can be on your flash drive.

   Under the hood, it runs the command tlmgr path add to add TinyTeX to the environment variable PATH of your system (or create symlinks of TinyTeX’s executables that can be found via PATH). If this fails, you still have a fallback plan. That is, set the global option tinytex.tlmgr.path and point it to the executable tlmgr in your system, e.g. (remember to replace the path in the example with the actual path to your TinyTeX),

   # a Windows example
   options(tinytex.tlmgr.path = 'E:/Software/TinyTeX/bin/win32/tlmgr.bat')
   
   # a macOS example
   options(tinytex.tlmgr.path = '~/Dropbox/TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-darwin/tlmgr')
   

   You can do this in your ~/.Rprofile (recommended) or a code chunk of an R Markdown document that generates PDF output. Don’t set this option in your R console unless you are trying to generate PDF in the R console via functions like rmarkdown::render() or knitr::knit2pdf().

One folder to rule them all. No dependency hell. No waste of disk space. No IT support. Just help yourself.