org-babel uses wrong directory during execution of source blocks (org-compile-file error)

Question

I'm experiencing a strange error when trying to execute/compile a LaTeX source block in org-babel. A simple example looks like this:

#+NAME: latex1802142321
#+BEGIN_SRC latex :results raw :file latex1802142321.pdf :packages '(("" "forest")) :border 0em :noweb yes :eval no-export :tangle latex1802142321.tex
\Forest{
  [a
    [b]
    [c]]
}
#+END_SRC

Everything works fine with vanilla Emacs (25.3.1, org-mode 8.2). But with my configuration (org-mode 9.1.6), something goes wrong, and the compilation exits with the following messages:

executing Latex code block (latex1802142321)...
Processing LaTeX file c:/Users/timm/AppData/Local/Temp/babel-12124NVL/latex-12124LOf.tex...
org-compile-file: File "c:/Users/timm/AppData/Local/Temp/babel-12124NVL/latex-12124LOf.pdf" wasn’t produced. 

I suspect that some part of org-babel is using the wrong directory. In fact, the PDF is generated in the directory of the org-mode file (along all the other temporary files), but not in AppData/Local/Temp/babel-12124NVL/. Really puzzling.

Any idea how I can tell org-babel to use the temporary directory?

Answer 1

The problem arises when the call of latexmk is lacking the option -cd %o. Here is how it is specified now:

(setq org-latex-pdf-process (list "latexmk -f -pdf %f -cd %o"))

See the discussion here.