pdflatex not found after fresh TeX Live installation (Ubuntu)

Question

I'm trying to install TeX Live on Ubuntu in order to use it with Pandoc. However, executing the Pandoc command gives me the error:

pdflatex not found. Please select a different --pdf-engine or install pdflatex

I followed the Quick install guide here: https://www.tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html, and ended up with the following script:

cd /tmp
wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
zcat install-tl-unx.tar.gz | tar xf -
cd install-tl-20*
sudo perl ./install-tl --no-interaction --scheme=minimal
PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2022/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH
sudo /usr/local/texlive/2022/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr init-usertree
sudo /usr/local/texlive/2022/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr update --all
sudo /usr/local/texlive/2022/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr install plex etoolbox footmisc ragged2e lastpage appendix float ulem listings geometry sidenotes mathpazo fancyhdr titlesec xcolor biblatex booktabs caption enumitem hyperref listings

Providing the direct path to tlmgr is a workaround to tlmgr not being available for sudo access after installation.

There is an existing question about pdflatex not being found. The accepted answer suggests running sudo apt install texlive-latex-base (Link to answer). That does fix the issue, but gives me two separate TeX Live installations. Running my Pandoc command afterwards fails with 'footnote.sty' not found, which I installed previously, so it clearly uses the other distribution.

I read somewhere that one should install TeX Live via the Quick install guide from above instead of through e.g. Ubunut's package manager, because they often are outdated. When I try to just install the texlive package via sudo apt install texlive, and then try to install packages via tlmgr, I indeed get the Local TeX Live is older than remote repository error that many questions on here also address.

So, it seems that the Quick install doesn't install pdflatex properly, even though everything I find says that it is supposed to be included. Does anybody know how to solve this, i.e. install TeX live properly? Perhaps I made a mistake when adjusting the commands from the install guide, but I can't figure out what.

Answer 1

You had installed the minimal scheme.

texdoc texlive documents the installer scheme option as:

So you had opted to only install plain tex, not latex

pandoc will be assuming a rather full set of packages, it is much simpler to always install the full scheme unless you are really short of space.