How to tell "minipage" to use top alignment?

[jgostick]

Description

I am following up on my question in #12030 which I have now distilled down to a single question: How do I pass vertical alignment information to the minipage command?

When looking at the tex output of my project (using quarto render index_demo.qmd --to tex) it has the following code snippet:

\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{minipage}{0.50\linewidth}
\centering{

But if I manually add [t] after each {minipage} the it renders beautifully in PDF (matches the HTML output with all figures aligned vertically). So I need the tex file to look like this:

\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.50\linewidth}
\centering{

Note the appearance of the [t] on the second line! Of course I can do a find-replace on this before rendering my PDF, but I would obviously prefer if Quarto would take care of this for me.

[mcanouil]

fig-pos="t" should be doing that and/or layout-valign="top" but it does not seem to work for layout figures.
I think there is an issue related to this somewhere.

---
title: "Quarto Playground"
format: pdf
keep-tex: true
---

## Section 1

::: {#fig-placeholder layout-ncol="2" fig-pos="t" layout-valign="top"}

![{{< lipsum 1-1 >}}]({{< placeholder 600 400 >}}){#fig-a1 fig-pos="t"}

![{{< lipsum 6-6 >}}]({{< placeholder 600 400 >}}){#fig-a2 fig-pos="t"}

![{{< lipsum 3-3 >}}]({{< placeholder 600 400 >}}){#fig-a3 fig-pos="t"}

![{{< lipsum 7-7 >}}]({{< placeholder 600 400 >}}){#fig-a4 fig-pos="t"}

A global caption for all images.

:::

[mcanouil]

I think the issue is basically this one:

• Multiple columns and vertical alignment (LaTeX) #9109

[mcanouil]

Currently, I don't see a good workaround besides changing the format from format: pdf to format: latex and post-process the LaTeX file (modification and rendering).
You could leverage post-render script to ease this: https://quarto.org/docs/projects/scripts.html#pre-and-post-render

[jgostick]

Wow, that post-render script option looks very promising.

Thanks again for all your help today. At some point in the near future I will be publishing a very detailed review article that uses Quarto. I will be pushing the PDF to Arxiv, and publishing the HTML to a website. I will submit it to the 'show and tell' section here!

[mcanouil]

Depending on the nature of your project (i.e., if not a Book), Typst is a very promising markup to generate PDF.
I believe for this particular case, the alignment issue is not there as all figures are top-aligned by default.

https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/typst.html