How to specify metadata via the command line?

[connorp]

I am trying to specify minimal output for the HTML format via the command line and I haven't been able to figure out how to do it. Is it possible to set format-specific parameters via the command line?

(My real goal is just to get HTML output without embedded CSS, but also without specifying a CSS file (I just want plain HTML), which I can do with pandoc directly on the command line via -M document-css=false, but I'm not sure how to get this result with Quarto. Any suggestions?

[jimjam-slam]

You'd probably wanna start with theme: none, which turns off Bootstrap! Not sure if there's any other CSS left after that, though 🤔

[jimjam-slam]

I wonder if a project profile could pull this together? It's a bit messy, but 🤷🏻‍♂️

[connorp]

So I think the move here is to pass an additional YAML file with those contents, via --execute-params. However, that command line argument doesn't appear to work…? Probably time to file a different question or a bug report.

[mcanouil]

--execute-params is for parameters (see https://quarto.org/docs/computations/parameters.html) not metadata.

In order to change/update metadata, you need to use --metadata. 😉

[connorp]

Ah. Well it looks like --metadata only accepts KEY:VALUE arguments, rather than a passed YAML file, no? Is there a way to pass it a specified YAML file containing metadata? (That's why I jumped to --execute-params, it was the only argument in the man pages that referenced passing a YAML file).

[mcanouil]

Based on the output of quarto render --helpI do not think there is a way to pass a yaml file for metadata, but Quarto accepts Pandoc command lines arguments.
So you could in theory use --metadata-file (https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#option--metadata-file).