I have a large bookdown project. It compiles perfectly well, into HTML and PDF.

But I would like bookdown to produce the TeX file, then do some processing on that TeX file before then producing the final PDF.

I have set (removing some lines for brevity) in my _output.yml file:

bookdown::pdf_book:
  latex_engine: xelatex
  self_contained: false
  keep_tex: yes

And indeed the file _main.tex is produced when using the Build button in Rstudio, or bookdown::render_book().

The file _main.tex is placed in the _book directory under the main directory, as one expects.

What commands do I then run to produce the PDF file from this .tex file?

I see three options, all of which fail:

1. Run tinytex::xelatex(file="_main.tex") from the main directory.
   This obviously fails, because the file _main.tex is not in that directory: Error: LaTeX failed to compile _main.tex.
2. Run tinytex::xelatex(file="_book/_main.tex") from the main directory.
   This fails to find some image files: ! LaTeX Error: File '01-Introduction_files/figure-latex/FIG-1' not found.
   These files are produced, but reside in the directory _bookdown_files, under the main directory, which cannot be found.
3. Move to the _book directory first (i.e., setwd("_book")), then run tinytex::xelatex(file="_main.tex").
   This fails, complaining about missing files again (the image files are, for instance, a directory above).

It seems like this should be easy, but I am clearly missing something.

So my question:

• How can I successfully compile the .tex file that is produced by running bookdown::render_book()?

Any help appreciated.

P.