Problem in brief

When trying to build the PDF using the Copernicus Journal template, the markdown process hangs and never completes.
A process running in the back at a 100 % is pdftex, no error message is shown. Other templates I have tested The R Journal and the Elsevier work though. The problem might be related to pdftex itself and not directly to rticles, see details below.

How to reproduce

Prerequisites (more details in the background)

• Fairly recent pandoc version, but not the newest (I used pandoc 2.10, pandoc 2.12 will not work for other reasons)
• Latest version of tinytex and/or TeXLive 2020

Example

RStudio >> File >> New File >> R Markdown >> [From Template] >> [Select Copernicus Journal Article] >> [OK] >> [Hit the Knit button]

A reduced markdown example using the Copernicus template and showing the problem reads:

---
title: Template for preparing your manuscript submission to Copernicus journals using RMarkdown
journal: "`r rticles::copernicus_journal_abbreviations(journal_name = 'communication')`"
bibliography: sample.bib
running:
  title: R Markdown Template for Copernicus
  author: Nüst et al.
output:
  rticles::copernicus_article: default
  bookdown::pdf_book:
    base_format: rticles::copernicus_article # for using bookdown features like \@ref()
---

Read [@Feynman1963118]

Background information

I bumped into that problem out of a sudden, while trying to rebuild a manuscript I am currently working on. I could not recall that I had changed something that might explain the behavior. After a couple of hours of digging and testing, I narrowed down the issue. Here the bullet points:

• When I tried to rebuild the PDF from the TEX-file created during the non-successful build with an external LaTeX editor, in my case TexShop for macOS I encountered the same problem and the activity monitor showed me that pdflatex was going wild.

• After I switched from TeXLive 2020 to TeXLive 2019 I could build the PDF without any problem. However, in RStudio it still did not work until I completely removed tinytex via tinytex::uninstall_tinytex(). tinytex::reinstall_tinytex() with Tex Live 2019 did not do the trick.

• With tinytex removed the problem became highly reproducible, I just had to switch between the TeXLive 2020 (does not work) and TeXLive 2019 (does work).

• My problem must have started with some recent update of tinytex (although I don't understand fully what happened), because when I had switched already back to TeXLive 2019, tinytex was still using TeXLive 2020.

• My best guess is that the problem is related to the pdftex version shipped with TeXLive 2020; perhaps this problem occurs only on macOS? Updating packages from TexLive via the update tools does not help.

• However, I updated to TexLive 2020 (the MacTeX-2020 distribution) after it appeared somewhat in May 2020. Since then I regularly work with LaTeX (usually outside RStudio) with rather complex and large documents (a couple of hundred pages, multiple reference lists etc.): This is the first time I encounter this problem. It seems to occur only for the Copernicus template. Is there something particular in it?

Finally, I am not sure whether this is a real rticles problem (or tinytex). Nevertheless, I decided to post it here because I encountered the bug when I used the Copernicus template from rticles with rticles. So if other people bump into the same problem, it is likely that they will start from here.

Unfortunately, the bug is not easy to fathom because no error message is shown. But perhaps my report helps to get to the bottom of it.

Session output

R Under development (unstable) (2020-10-12 r79333)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Catalina 10.15.7, RStudio 1.4.904

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

Package version:
  base64enc_0.1.3 digest_0.6.25   evaluate_0.14   glue_1.4.2     
  graphics_4.1.0  grDevices_4.1.0 highr_0.8       htmltools_0.5.0
  jsonlite_1.7.1  knitr_1.30      magrittr_1.5    markdown_1.1   
  methods_4.1.0   mime_0.9        rlang_0.4.8     rmarkdown_2.4  
  rticles_0.16    stats_4.1.0     stringi_1.5.3   stringr_1.4.0  
  tinytex_0.26    tools_4.1.0     utils_4.1.0     xfun_0.18      
  yaml_2.2.1    

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