FR: Auto-detect Quarto's bundled pandoc as fallback
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- Dominant language
- R
- Stars
- 137
- Forks
- 10
- Avg merge
- 10h 48m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 4
Description
(Potential upstream issue.)
Hi folks.
I just ran into this error on a new laptop, whilst calling some of the btw help documentation tools (e.g., btw_tool_docs_help_page) from the CLI:
Mcp error: -32603: pandoc is required and was not found (see the help page ?rmarkdown::pandoc_available).
The error is obvious enough; I didn't have pandoc installed as a "standalone" binary and available on my PATH (via my package manager). OTOH it's not the full truth, since I do have Quarto installed and this obviously bundles its own pandoc. I can imagine that other users are in a similar boat and this made me think that having a fallback option to / check for Quarto pandoc would be a useful feature.
What do you think about adding automatic detection of Quarto's bundled pandoc as a fallback when rmarkdown::pandoc_available() returns FALSE? Specifically, we could check common Quarto installation paths:
- macOS:
/Applications/quarto/bin/tools/pandoc - Windows:
~/AppData/Local/Programs/Quarto/bin/tools/pandoc - Linux:
/opt/quarto/bin/tools/pandoc
If found we could set Sys.setenv(RSTUDIO_PANDOC = <path>) to make it available to rmarkdown during this session?
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
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- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the CLI entry point mentioned, btw_tool_docs_help_page, and inspect how it checks rmarkdown::pandoc_available(). Verify the proposed macOS, Windows, and Linux Quarto paths, then confirm that a detected bundled pandoc is made available for the session without changing the existing error when none is found.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- r
- Domain
- cli, tooling
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100