I'm using Pandoc to convert my markdown files to different formats including html and docx. With PDF though, I get the message pdflatex not found even though it was installed and I can even call it directly from Cygwin.
Why is Pandoc not detecting Pdflatex and what can I do to fix this issue?
I just ran into this - I suspect you installed the windows version of Pandoc. In cygwin, if you run which pandoc do you get something like /cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Pandoc/pandoc?
If so, it appears that version expects windows-style paths (e.g. C:\path\to\pdflatex), but cygwin is probably giving it something like "/path/to/pdflatex".
You might find success building pandoc from source, inside your cygwin environment.
@Wiscocrew's answer is on the right path, but, unfortunately, it is a little more complicated than that.
Pandoc permits you to pass the full path to pdflatex with the --latex-engine switch (c.f. http://pandoc.org/README.html#options-affecting-specific-writers), but if you just do something like
--latex-engine=`cygpath -w /usr/bin/pdflatex`
Pandoc gives a different error: pandoc.exe: latex-engine must be pdflatex, lualatex, or xelatex.. The reason for this error is that Cygwin's pdflatex is an symlink:
$ ls -lh /usr/bin/pdflatex
lrwxrwxrwx 1 myuser Domain Users 10 Mar 14 11:52 /usr/bin/pdflatex -> pdftex.exe
My work around was to copy /usr/bin/pdftex.exe to /usr/local/bin/pdflatex.exe and pass it to Pandoc like so:
pandoc Foo.md -o Foo.pdf --latex-engine='C:\\cygwin64\\usr\\local\\bin\\pdflatex.exe' -t latex -s
