sumatrapdf | GPLv3 license , with some code under BSD license

There's a few reasons why environment variables may be different. Chiefly:

1. The user account being used by the runner
2. The powershell profile you're using locally (which will not be used by the runner)
3. Any changes to environment variables made in the runner's config.toml
4. environment variables changed/added through CI/CD variables.

The effective PATH is a combination of both the system environment variables as well as user environment variables. For your runner to reflect the same environment variables that you see locally when running powershell, you must use the same user account, otherwise user environment variables you're seeing may be missing/different based on the user account.

One way to fix differences that may be caused by the user would be to change the user used by the gitlab service

To change the user used by the GitLab runner, go to services -> gitlab-runner -> (right-click) properties -> Log On tab and choose the account the runner should use.

Alternatively, specify this when installing the runner:

Use setx to permanently update an environment variable. Don't hack the registry.

After you invoke setx, just update the Path environment manually in the current session. Powershell: Reload the path in PowerShell

What Windows will execute is not trivial, since it might depend on the API used.

One of them is CreateProcessW:

1. The directory from which the application loaded.
2. The current directory for the parent process.
3. The 32-bit Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
4. The 16-bit Windows system directory. There is no function that obtains the path of this directory, but it is searched. The name of this directory is System.
5. The Windows directory. Use the GetWindowsDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
6. The directories that are listed in the PATH environment variable. Note that this function does not search the per-application path specified by the App Paths registry key. To include this per-application path in the search sequence, use the ShellExecute function.

Since Windows Vista, the environment variable %NoDefaultCurrentDirectoryInExePath% configures whether or not the current directory should be searched (Source: MSDN).

Also: if you just run python without an extension, the environment variable %PathExt% is used to find executable extensions. (Source: MSDN).

The default value for the PATHEXT variable is: .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC

A great tool for troubleshooting such issues is SysInternals Process Monitor. Set a filter for "path contains python" (not python.exe) and you'll see the exact search order. It will report "NO SUCH FILE" for directories which do not contain a Python executable.

Also note: the search order for DLLs may be different.

Rendering a pdf_document relies on generating intermediate latex code, which gets processed in your latex interpreter to build a document. For any issue with your pdf document, I can recommend looking at the underlying latex code (by adding keep_tex as output argument.

In your case, table code is generated, with the following lines:

Normally you should put it as two separated elements on list '-print-settings' and '"landscape,1,5x"'

In my opinion Adobe Acrobat is right but the specification could be read differently, too.

Your PDF contains the following content stream:

As it turned out I was having big issued with command prompt, I had to restore my win10 users' settings to make everything work again.

However, since sublime text 3 uses cmd.exe to run its build systems, I came out with a workaround. The following line did the job even with a compromised cmd

concatenating 2 strings to form an existing variable

That won't work in PowerShell, variable tokens are always treated literally.

I'd suggest you use a hashtable instead: