How to share YAML front matter across documents?

[lillemets]

I have a directory containing Revealjs presentations formatted as .qmd documents. Currently each file has a 12 lines of YAML front matter of which only one line (title) is not identical across documents. With Rmarkdown I could just put the execution options in _outupt.yml. I attempted the same with _quarto.yml but that is completely ignored when rendering Revealjs presentations in Rstudio.

How could I mimic the _output.yml of Rmarkdown in Quarto?

[dragonstyle]

You have a couple of options:

1. Use a project file https://quarto.org/docs/projects/quarto-projects.html#project-metadata

2. Use a _metadata.yml file within a directory to apply metadata to the files in the directory (this seems like what you're looking for assuming you don't want to group the revealjs presentations into a project) https://quarto.org/docs/projects/quarto-projects.html#project-metadata

HTH!

[lillemets]

I have read the referred instructions but as I mentioned, _quarto.yml is simply ignored when rendering.

In the .qmd YAML I have

---
title: Title
---

In the same directory as the .qmd file I can have _quarto.yml or _metadata.yml containing

format: 
  revealjs: 
    self-contained: true
    preview-links: auto
    slide-number: c/t

The result of rendering the .qmd is a regular HTML file and what ever parameters I set are ignored. However, setting execute-dir: project in _quarto.yml seems to work. So it is just the execution options that are ignored in all .yml files. I must be doing something wrong but I have no idea what it is.

[dragonstyle]

I'm not seeing this behavior as I test locally. Using the above examples (I added a reveal theme to make it very obvious) with the metadata in a _quarto.yml file next to the input file resulted in a properly themed reveal presentation when rendering. I was testing either in VS.Code or just using the terminal directly (perhaps our tooling might account for the difference).

My original answer is pretty confusing/wrong about _metadata.yml files as these only work in the context of projects (which is what establishes the boundaries of containership where we'll search for _metadata files. You really want the project in this case, unless this folder is already a subfolder of a project...

[lillemets]

I really appreciate your effort. I guess I'm not completely wrong then. I do have _metadata.yml in the same directory as the .qmd and _quarto.yml and .quarto in parent directory. As said, neither of the YAML files are recognized when rendering.

It might have something to do with RStudio. I'm currently unable to test rendering in terminal as the Quarto package has dependency issues on Arch Linux but will try that when possible.