Running pdflatex Using the Alpine Pandoc LaTeX Image

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2021-06-18 20:00:05

I use a custom Perl script which uses pdflatex to generate invoices for my customers. Currently the program runs in a VirtualBox virtual machine (Ubuntu). But since I want to switch to Apple Silicon in the near future I am currently moving several programs to Docker. I was able to make the Perl program, after a few minor modifications, on macOS except for the external call to pdflatex. Since I want to reduce the number of programs I have to install directly on macOS I decided to "dockerize" pdflatex.

Because I want the Docker image to be small I started out with an Alpine image. But installing texlive-full resulted in an image of several gigabytes! After a few experiments I decided to see if I could just run pdflatex from a Pandoc Docker image I already needed for creating my resume.

Since I had seen the same error when building the image I use to create my resume I already knew the solution: install the missing package using tlmgr. So I updated the Dockerfile:

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