How to select a profile based on the format?

[cod3licious]

Description

Is there a way to somehow always use a specific profile together with certain formats? I.e., I want one profile used when rendering to epub and another profile for everything else.

I thought something like this should work:

# _quarto.yml
project:
  type: book
book:
  title: "Some title"
  # no chapters
profile:
  group:
  # the profiles are mutually exclusive
    - [default, epub]
  # always render with both profiles so I get all 3 formats that I need
  default: default,epub

# _quarto-default.yml
book:
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - part: part1.qmd
      chapters:
      - 01_chapter.qmd
      - 02_chapter.qmd
    - part: part2.qmd
      chapters:
      - 03_chapter.qmd
      - 04_chapter.qmd
format:
  html: default
  pdf: default

# _quarto-epub.yml
book:
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - part1.qmd
    - 01_chapter.qmd
    - 02_chapter.qmd
    - part2.qmd
    - 03_chapter.qmd
    - 04_chapter.qmd
format:
  epub: default

but somehow now both chapter lists are included in the outputs instead of only picking the correct list based on the current format (even though based on the documentation I thought by using profile: group I was specifying that these profiles are mutually exclusive).

I also tried to only have the chapter lists in the respective profile config files, and keep the formats in the main config and then only reference the specific profile per format, i.e.,

# _quarto.yml
profile:
  default: default
format:
  html: default
  pdf: default
  epub:
    profile:
      default: epub

but this just resulted in the default profile being chosen for all.

It would be really great the if the render command without any options would just correctly render all formats with the corresponding profile settings and if I specify an individual format (e.g., --to epub) it would also pick the correct profile for this. But in the existing documentation, this use case isn't covered and I don't know what else to try 😕

[mcanouil]

Default profile is supposed to be one profile, here you are merging the two as one default.
Specifying multiple profiles means to apply them all at once as documented.

Use quarto render --profile NAME. This will render the formats defined by the profile.
Currently, it means you have to run the command twice:

• quarto render
• quarto render --profile epub

[cod3licious]

Thanks!
I think then I was probably confused by the documentation since I thought something like quarto render --profile advanced,production would not necessarily merge both profiles together (at least when specifying the profile groups). But ok, then I guess I'll just run the command twice afterall.

[mcanouil]

Since profiles setup different configuration, quarto render needs to be executed for each configuration.

Note that more than one profile can be activated at once. For example, here we activate both the production and advanced profiles:

quarto render --profile production,advanced

From https://quarto.org/docs/projects/profiles.html#activating-profiles, here the important keywords are "at once" and "and".

You usually wants to add several profile when you have a profile used as a base for several other profiles allowing you to avoir duplication: default,beginner, default/advanced, etc.
This way you have one _quarto.yml that is shared.