How can I disable indented code blocks in Quarto? #14935

beedell-roke · 2026-09-23T11:45:30Z

beedell-roke
Sep 23, 2026

Description

As many hundreds have asked about for other CommonMark-related technologies, ¹ I want to disable the four-space pre > code syntax. I want to because it prevents me utilising indented HTML code, when I add any content that includes a \n (most frequently, content inside a pre > code). That is because CommonMark solely supports indented HTML when it does not span a line break.

This question may not be best placed in the .*-cli repository. Please transfer it, if so.

meta.discourse.org/t/112161/14 ↩

mcanouil · 2026-09-23T12:18:35Z

mcanouil
Sep 23, 2026
Collaborator

Do you have a small reproducible example?

6 replies

mcanouil Sep 23, 2026
Collaborator

Thanks that's helpful.

The issue in the end is that you are mixing HTML and markdown, as mentioned by Carlos, in Quarto 1.*, Pandoc is the main parser, unfortunately it parses text in the middle of HTML as markdown, thus the "weird" state.

The only way to solve that is to be explicit with raw HTML block as the LLM user showed.

Note that in your particular example, you don't need to bother with HTML at all. > ... is the markup for blockquote.

---
format: html
---

This is `text/markdown`, rather than `/HTML`:

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi.
>
> > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi. 
> >
> > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi.
>
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi.

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beedell-roke Sep 23, 2026
Author

Note that in your particular example, you don't need to bother with HTML at all. > ... is the markup for blockquote.

@mcanouil, what I want to achieve is a work-around to:

My current implementation is effectively the undermentioned:

`js.js`

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
const updateHeadingLevels = root => {
	for (const heading of root.querySelectorAll('[role="heading"]')) {
		let level = 1;
		let section = heading.closest('section');
		while (section) {
			level++;
			section = section.parentElement?.closest('section') ?? null;
		}
		heading.ariaLevel = String(level);
	}
};
updateHeadingLevels(document);
new MutationObserver(() => updateHeadingLevels(document))
	.observe(document.body, {
		childList: true,
		subtree: true,
	});

`html.html`

<!docType HTML>
<HTML>
	<head>
		<title>Page tltlmx</title>
		<meta charSet="UTF-8">
		<meta
			name="viewport"
			content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"
		>
		<style>
			section
				{
					margin-inline-start: 2em;
				}
			[role="heading"]
				{
					font-weight: bold;
				}
			body
				{
					max-width: 21cm;
				}
		</style>
		<script
			defer
			type="text/javaScript"
			src="./js.js"
		></script>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p role="heading">Heading Text</p>
		<section>
			<p role="heading">Heading Text</p>
			<section>
				<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi. In pariatur qui dolore aliquip sunt irure labore. At cumque temporibus aute officia quidem. Ea atque eos minim quod non nulla pariatur. Sunt quod adipiscing nulla sunt ut imperdiet dolor possimus accusamus. Aut mollitia quidem cum aliquip corrupti imperdiet dolore tempore quas quibusdam molestias. Atque qui pariatur reprehenderit dignissimos quos dignissimos esse ea repellendus. Qui cum quidem cum omnis est et dolore et anim id expedita ut. Deleniti molestias excepturi quibusdam consequat occaecat ipsum occaecat.</p>
			</section>
			<p role="heading">Heading Text</p>
			<section>
				<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi. In pariatur qui dolore aliquip sunt irure labore. At cumque temporibus aute officia quidem. Ea atque eos minim quod non nulla pariatur. Sunt quod adipiscing nulla sunt ut imperdiet dolor possimus accusamus. Aut mollitia quidem cum aliquip corrupti imperdiet dolore tempore quas quibusdam molestias. Atque qui pariatur reprehenderit dignissimos quos dignissimos esse ea repellendus. Qui cum quidem cum omnis est et dolore et anim id expedita ut. Deleniti molestias excepturi quibusdam consequat occaecat ipsum occaecat:</p>
				<section>
					<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi. In pariatur qui dolore aliquip sunt irure labore. At cumque temporibus aute officia quidem. Ea atque eos minim quod non nulla pariatur. Sunt quod adipiscing nulla sunt ut imperdiet dolor possimus accusamus. Aut mollitia quidem cum aliquip corrupti imperdiet dolore tempore quas quibusdam molestias. Atque qui pariatur reprehenderit dignissimos quos dignissimos esse ea repellendus. Qui cum quidem cum omnis est et dolore et anim id expedita ut. Deleniti molestias excepturi quibusdam consequat occaecat ipsum occaecat.</p>
					<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi. In pariatur qui dolore aliquip sunt irure labore. At cumque temporibus aute officia quidem. Ea atque eos minim quod non nulla pariatur. Sunt quod adipiscing nulla sunt ut imperdiet dolor possimus accusamus. Aut mollitia quidem cum aliquip corrupti imperdiet dolore tempore quas quibusdam molestias. Atque qui pariatur reprehenderit dignissimos quos dignissimos esse ea repellendus. Qui cum quidem cum omnis est et dolore et anim id expedita ut. Deleniti molestias excepturi quibusdam consequat occaecat ipsum occaecat.</p>
				</section>
				<p role="heading">Heading Text</p>
				<section>
					<p role="heading">Heading Text</p>
					<section>
						<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi. In pariatur qui dolore aliquip sunt irure labore. At cumque temporibus aute officia quidem. Ea atque eos minim quod non nulla pariatur. Sunt quod adipiscing nulla sunt ut imperdiet dolor possimus accusamus. Aut mollitia quidem cum aliquip corrupti imperdiet dolore tempore quas quibusdam molestias. Atque qui pariatur reprehenderit dignissimos quos dignissimos esse ea repellendus. Qui cum quidem cum omnis est et dolore et anim id expedita ut. Deleniti molestias excepturi quibusdam consequat occaecat ipsum occaecat.</p>
					</section>
					<p role="heading">Heading Text</p>
					<section>
						<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit reprehenderit nisi. In pariatur qui dolore aliquip sunt irure labore. At cumque temporibus aute officia quidem. Ea atque eos minim quod non nulla pariatur. Sunt quod adipiscing nulla sunt ut imperdiet dolor possimus accusamus. Aut mollitia quidem cum aliquip corrupti imperdiet dolore tempore quas quibusdam molestias. Atque qui pariatur reprehenderit dignissimos quos dignissimos esse ea repellendus. Qui cum quidem cum omnis est et dolore et anim id expedita ut. Deleniti molestias excepturi quibusdam consequat occaecat ipsum occaecat.</p>
					</section>
				</section>
			</section>
		</section>
	</body>
</HTML>

However, I must also utilise Quarto for this, because I need the code-blocks that CommonMark provides, and the ability to evaluate code that Quarto provides, because I am attempting to author a thesis.

Can it be achieved otherwise? I doubt so. I've investigated RST, ASCIIDoc, Typst, ¹ and every CommonMark superset's native functionality. Solely DocBook may be semantically sufficient, but lacks widespread support, especially in Quarto! The next best is the WHATWG's HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript languages, pre-processed by Quarto, due to their inclusion in its CommonMark subset.

forum.typst.app/t/7120/6 ↩

mcanouil Sep 24, 2026
Collaborator

I'm not sure I fully follow what you're trying to achieve and from what input, so let me check one thing first.

From your html.html, it looks like you want nested sections where each heading's level comes from its depth, and each section is indented. If so, Quarto already produces that structure from plain Markdown headings. HTML output wraps each heading and its content in nested <section class="levelN"> elements, so the heading level always matches the nesting depth.

---
format:
  html:
    include-in-header:
      text: |
        <style>
        section section {
          margin-inline-start: 2em;
        }
        </style>
---

# Heading Text

## Heading Text

Lorem ipsum.

### Heading Text

Lorem ipsum.

For a nested block without a heading, ::: {.section} renders as a <section> element too. (this translation is limited to HTML-based formats)

::: {.section}
This is a section in `text/markdown`.
:::

<section>
<p>This is a section in <code>text/markdown</code>.</p>
</section>

If that isn't what you're after, could you describe the input/output you'd like to get, rather than the HTML you're writing to get there?

beedell-roke Sep 27, 2026
Author

@mcanouil, the problem with standard HTML5 markup (including its derivatives, which includes CommonMark, and its supersets) is that:

It solely supports six levels of depth. I need support for an arbitrary depth.
The in-source heading markup requires a level at the point of definition, so recomputing its hierarchy when the page structure changes is difficult (per one of the cited issues).

Additionally, per the other issue, Quarto (like HTML5) doesn't appear to provide a way to indent text. For me, this is important, because I consider section-delimited indentation to be an accessibility aid in long documents. It certainly works for me, and has for others I've consulted.

mcanouil Sep 28, 2026
Collaborator

Following up on my earlier comment, a raw HTML block isn't in fact the only way.
You can also change how Pandoc reads the document with the from option.
Disabling the markdown_in_html_blocks extension stops Pandoc from parsing Markdown inside HTML blocks, so they pass through as HTML:

---
format: html
from: markdown-markdown_in_html_blocks
---

With that, your nested <blockquote> example with the blank line renders as nested blockquotes instead of a code block.

Note that from: commonmark_x won't help here.
It follows CommonMark, where a blank line ends an HTML block, so the indented content after it still becomes a code block.
The extension markdown_in_html_blocks is not supported for commonmark_x.

See https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-markdown_in_html_blocks for details.

cscheid · 2026-09-23T14:39:13Z

cscheid Sep 23, 2026
Maintainer

@beedell-roke @mcanouil Just FYI, I'm just going to delete this entire top-level comment here. I'm not interested in LLMs participating in this discussion forum.

cscheid · 2026-09-23T13:39:13Z

cscheid
Sep 23, 2026
Maintainer

For what's worth, Quarto 2 uses (our own) variant of Markdown that simply doesn't allow indented code blocks at all (with no option to turn them back on). I imagine there will be some folks who won't be happy about that, but I needed the parser to be relatively simple and robust, and couldn't make a sufficiently-good tree-sitter grammar that included indented code blocks plus bullet lists.

5 replies

beedell-roke Sep 23, 2026
Author

@cscheid, if this is not necessarily too much of a digression for this topic, can q2 be utilised in VS Code (Insiders) for desktop Linux-based OSes? Currently, I've it installed via python3.14 -m pip install quarto-cli, and utilise it via the quarto.quarto VSX, if relevant.

cscheid Sep 23, 2026
Maintainer

can q2 be utilised in VS Code (Insiders) for desktop Linux-based OSes? Currently, I've it installed via python3.14 -m pip install quarto-cli, and utilise it via the quarto.quarto VSX, if relevant.

That's not Quarto 2 you're getting. I'm talking about https://github.com/quarto-dev/q2, which is in active development and not on PyPI yet.

cscheid Sep 23, 2026
Maintainer

We don't currently have VS Code (or Positron) extensions for Quarto 2, though we will eventually develop them.

beedell-roke Sep 23, 2026
Author

@cscheid, thanks.

That's not Quarto 2 you're getting. I'm talking about quarto-dev/q2, which is in active development and not on PyPI yet.

(I'm aware it's not. I was providing my environment, in case it mattered; frequently, rewrites also include a reduction in supported environments.)

cscheid Sep 23, 2026
Maintainer

rewrites also include a reduction in supported environments

I understand the frustration you're expressing. With that said, we intend everyone who uses Quarto 1 to be able to use Quarto 2 just as easily, with comparable (actually better!) tooling, and similarly permissive licenses. We've worked pretty hard to bring most of the features and usage scenarios of RMarkdown into Quarto. We're planning on doing the same here and I think we have the means and ability to do it.

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How can I disable indented code blocks in Quarto? #14935

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beedell-roke Sep 23, 2026

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js.js

html.html

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mcanouil
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`js.js`

`html.html`

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