You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
{{ message }}
Repository navigation
FR: Auto-detect Quarto's bundled pandoc as fallback #110
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:
hmm I'm kind of surprised rmarkdown::pandoc_available() doesn't do that already? I'll ask my friends on the Quarto team if they have any recommendations before we go down this path, but this seems pretty reasonable to me.
Let's wait for this issue in the pandoc R package to come through; we can either use that version or inline a local copy until we're ready to take a full dependency on pandoc.
Activity
gadenbuie commentedon Oct 20, 2025
hmm I'm kind of surprised
rmarkdown::pandoc_available()doesn't do that already? I'll ask my friends on the Quarto team if they have any recommendations before we go down this path, but this seems pretty reasonable to me.grantmcdermott commentedon Oct 20, 2025
Super, thanks @gadenbuie.
gadenbuie commentedon Oct 21, 2025
Let's wait for this issue in the pandoc R package to come through; we can either use that version or inline a local copy until we're ready to take a full dependency on pandoc.