tikzDevice fails without LaTeX installation

[jvcasillas]

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I am attempting to use tikzDevice to create a vectorized figure in R. Here is a minimal, self-contained, (hopefully) reproducible example:

require(tikzDevice)
options(tikzLatexPackages = c(getOption("tikzLatexPackages"), "\\usepackage{tipa}"))
tikz("plot_test.tex", standAlone = TRUE)
plot(cars)
dev.off()

The error I receive is rather long. I will paste below the section I believe is most relevant:

	\char77

Run the following commands for diagnosis:

	tikzTest()
	tikzTest("\\char77")

Common reasons for failure include:
  * The string contains a character which is special to LaTeX unless
    escaped properly, such as % or $.
  * The string makes use of LaTeX commands provided by a package and
    the tikzDevice was not told to load the package.

Based on the plot in my example, I do not believe that this error has to do with characters that need to be escaped.

Session info:

R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Mojave 10.14.5, RStudio 1.2.1335

Locale: en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8 / C / en_US.UTF-8 / en_US.UTF-8

Package version:
  graphics_3.6.0  grDevices_3.6.0 stats_3.6.0     tinytex_0.14   
  tools_3.6.0     utils_3.6.0     xfun_0.8  

[yihui]

I feel this issue belongs to https://github.com/daqana/tikzDevice. TinyTeX is only one of the possible LaTeX distributions.

[yihui]

If tikzDevice switches to tinytex::latexmk() to compile tikz graphics, this issue might be automatically resolved. I mentioned it last year at daqana/tikzDevice#172 (comment).