qpdf.exe for compactPDF?

user_513463 0
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I am trying to check a package that I have built (with vignette) using R CMD check --as-cran [my package] in my windows command prompt. All goes well until I get the message,

WARNING 'qpdf' is needed for checks on size reduction of PDFs

I have downloaded qpdf, put the unzipped folder in my program files directory, and added the bin folder to the PATH.

Not quite sure what else I need to do? I have the feeling I have not installed qpdf correctly or I need to build this program itself? I have read through the readme files and manual for qpdf which appear to be more aimed at unix users (which I have no experience with... I am your standard/regular windows user with little to no programming experience outside of statistical languages). I have had a go at trying to build qpdf using cgywin, but ended up failing to install zlib and prec. Any tips?

r
5 Answers

There are a couple of other things to consider on a Windows machine:

If you are running the 32-bit version of R, it is important that you download the 32-bit version of qpdf, which is the version linked from the SourceForge homepage. If you are running a 64-bit installation of R, you will need to do a bit of digging to locate the 64-bit version of qpdf, which is buried a little more deeply (version 7.0 is listed here).

Once you have extracted the zipped qpdf directory to your hard disk, perhaps under C:\Program Files\, added C:\Program Files\qpdf-version_number\bin to your system PATH under the environment variables, and re-launched R, Windows needs to establish that pqdf is safe to run.

Navigate to C:\Program Files\qpdf-version_numer\bin and execute qpdf.exe (by double-clicking). Windows 10 throws up a security warning, as it's an unrecognized executable file. You'll need to use the more options link to find the button to run the program. This done, Windows will recognize the file as safe to run and allow other software, including R, to use it.

user_34380010

Recent developments: If you install Rtools 3.5 qpdf is included and that warning is gone. Rtools is a toolset for building packages on Windows and is recently reworked by Jeroen Ooms.

More information : https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/

Note that the changelog is incomplete, as Rtools 3.5 isn't frozen yet at the time of writing (2019-03-01). Even though it's not visible on the page yet, qpdf.exe is included in the bin directory after installation.

user_4287900

After installing the latest version of RTools, the warning still popped up. However, I noticed that the Windows "where" command gave two paths to qpdf (different versions). After removing the R_QPDF environment variable and removing the new install of qpdf from the Windows path, so that only qpdf in RTools was found, the warning disappeared.

user_47159690

I got the same warning on Ubuntu so here's a Ubuntu solution for completeness:

First update packages

sudo apt update

Then install qpdf with

sudo apt install qpdf

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04.

user_9364200
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