Diagnosing R package build warning: “LaTeX errors when creating PDF version”

Question

When building a package, I received the following warning:

* checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
This typicall         


        

Answer 1

Though @Dirk's answer also helped me to fix the problem I would like to add a bit which might especially help recent updaters. That is, people who haven't encountered other LaTeX / R troubles after the update to 3.1.3 yet. The problem is little bit more general than just building. For me, on OS X the problem was that R CMD Rd2pdf as well as the R CMD CHECK expected texi2dvi to be in /usr/local/bin while it was in /usr/bin. A symlink helped to fix the problem. On terminal type:

# to check whether the same issue exists for you
which texi2dvi
# if so
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/texi2dvi

Of course if the first line returns something else, you need to adapt the symlink here.