A collection of code/fixes for Tufte style documents.

[sasja-san]

Description

I've asked my clanker (Claude) to help me fix a bunch of issues I've had with PDF generation from Quarto and it figured many of the things out.

I've used Quarto for academic writing and for writing lab assignments for at intro to electronics course (among others). Some of the problems I've had was getting a table in the margin be indexable by @tbl-X, which I spent an hour or three on way back, but now Claude figured it out in a few minutes. Here are some pictures of what this allows you to do:

Example Images

Pages making use of callout boxis, as well as custom callout boxes (a filter in the lua/ dir) as well special way to make these boxes so that they don't adhere to the smallening of font sizes when placed in the margin.

A rotated full-page table. Also uses a gray bar on every other line of the table, makes tracking which line you're reading from a lot easier. I have yet to try out if I can create a tag which references it from the text, but I hope that part works (it's in another example, see pdf file). Also some Mermaid examples and code boxes (style declared in _quarto.yml).
I have since fixed the gray backgrounds. See bottom of this post.

This last image shows off what I used a lot of for lab exercises. When doing lab work (electrics lab) one desire you have with the document is that you want an easy check of correct answers. Meaning: You want the students to always write the answers for question nr. N on the same page on page P, so I needed an easy way to create lines which have correct spacing for hand writing.
Another thing happening here is that the lines at the bottom are adjusted to the bottom of the main column on the page. Because normally with the KOMA thing Quarto does there's no bottom of the bottom column. But this contains a fix for it.

The actual code:
quarto-tufte-template.zip

The generated PDF.
graphical_objects.pdf

Because I wanted to have better control over the page layout, the \geometry stuff had to move to the include-in-header section of the YML file. I hope you find it structured enough to extract what you need from it.

table-guides.lua update

As mentioned above, since writing this post my clanker figured out how to make the gray background not stick out on the sides in the tables. Here's the diff:

@@ -39,8 +39,24 @@
   return (tex:gsub('arraybackslash}p{', 'arraybackslash}m{'))
 end

+-- A stripe is painted a \tabcolsep wider than its cell on both sides, so in a
+-- table whose text is flush with the column the stripes stick out of it.
+-- Pandoc's column spec has @{} at both ends (no padding). Take them away:
+-- the text is then inset by \tabcolsep and the stripes end exactly at the
+-- edges of the column. The widths of p{} columns are given as
+-- (\linewidth - N\tabcolsep) * fraction: N grows by 2 for the two new paddings.
+local function inset(tex)
+  tex = tex:gsub('(\\begin{longtable}%[%]{)@{}', '%1', 1)
+  tex = tex:gsub('@{}}', '}', 1)
+  tex = tex:gsub('\\linewidth %- (%d+)\\tabcolsep', function(n)
+    return '\\linewidth - ' .. (tonumber(n) + 2) .. '\\tabcolsep'
+  end)
+  return tex
+end
+
 local function typeset(tbl, rules, stripe)
   local tex = centred(pandoc.write(pandoc.Pandoc({tbl}), 'latex'))
+  if stripe then tex = inset(tex) end
   -- rows of the body end with \\ at the end of a line; count from the first

[mcanouil]

@sasja-san Thanks for sharing.

May I suggest to share a GitHub repository instead of a Zip archive with unknown content?
Also, please do describe your images at least with alt-text, and details on the "fixes" and "code".
This will help future readers understand what you did and/or how they can use it.

Important

Accessibility: To improve accessibility, please add alternative text to your screenshots. This helps all users, including those using screen readers, to understand the context of the images. A brief description can make a big difference! See Good Alt Text, Bad Alt Text — Making Your Content Perceivable.

[sasja-san]

Zip archive with unknown content?

How is it unknown? I linked the PDF with the examples AND I posted pictures.

May I suggest to share a GitHub repository

You may. But I'm not gonna care. I solved a bunch of headaches and I'm not hiding it in some weird ass corner of the Internet. If people want to solve their Quarto problems they will be coming here to look it up, not going to that weird ass corner of the Internet.

including those using screen readers

??? It's a document about document layout? How and why would a person making use of a screen reader be looking at something that has to do with document layout? Provide an example, because you aren't making much sense.

But there's another point here which is important, my lack of descriptions are not searchable. That would be the real benefit. So I'll go back and revise the original post.