Is there a way to not have Quarto include escape character '\' before _ in template?

[DamonCharlesRoberts]

I created a template for myself and am having this issue where, when taking a file name that I provide in the yaml section of my Quarto document, it automatically places the \ escape character before an underscore symbol that I use for the file name in my LaTeX file. I'm not sure how clear this is coming across. So here's some examples:

In my quarto document, I have this:

bibliography: "current_projects/bibliography_file.bib"

I am then sending this through a .TeX template that takes the bibliography information and pastes it in:

\addbibresource{$for(bibliography)$$bibliography$$endfor$}%accessing the bilbiography file specified in the qmd

When I look at the intermediary TeX file it creates, somewhere along the line, Quarto automatically added the \ escape character before the underscore symbol in my file name. This, of course, makes it so that TinyTeX is unable to find that file.

\addbibresource{current\_projects/bibliography\_file.bib}

Do I need to make an adjustment to my template tex file or is there some way to set this up in my Quarto document?

[mcanouil]

This is a LaTeX constraint about underscores (at least for most of LaTeX).
Quarto is only fixing the wrongly not escaped underscores.

Does your tex file compile if you remove the \?
If yes, then maybe Quarto is trying too hard to be smart, thus it might need to be fixed.

[DamonCharlesRoberts]

Hi @dragonstyle: I think the escape characters added to the underscores are the issue. I just tried compiling the TeX document itself with Tectonic and it has problems with the escape characters. But I have no problems compiling the document when I remove the escape characters and leave the underscores to the file path and name.

So this is a pandoc issue rather than a Quarto issue?

[dragonstyle]

OK, that is good to know- I do think it is a Pandoc issue as it is doing the template substitution under the hood. I created a simple test case with a markdown file and template to confirm that it is doing this substitution:

Archive.zip

And then running

pandoc test.md --from markdown --to latex --template template.tex

[DamonCharlesRoberts]

Gotcha.

Okay, so should I basically just not use underscores then for my file names? Or to use mklatex as the pdf engine?

[dragonstyle]

Interesting - I'm actually not sure. Quarto can use TinyTex which provides some of the benefits of Tectonic and we default to using XeLaTeX as well - so you could simply try installing tinytex:

quarto install tinytex

and seeing whether rendered in this mode deals with the underscores properly (you could also experiment with using lualatex or pdflatex in this mode). If this worked, it would potentially point to an issue with Tectonic.

We did a lot of work on improving our TinyTex support in v1.2, so I could encourage you to use the Release Candidate if you want to give this route a try:

https://quarto.org/docs/download/

[DamonCharlesRoberts]

Looks like this happens with TinyTex too. I'll just use - instead of _ in my file names. Didn't know that about pandoc.

Thanks for the help @dragonstyle and @mcanouil !!

[Nenuial]

I put this here in case anybody finds this like I did.
I was looking for a way to have a path in an extension (they will inevitably have an underscore in the path because they are located in the _extensions folder) with the underscore that isn't escaped by pandoc.

I finally found that if the variable is defined under the variables key, then there will be no escaping. Example :

title: "Example extension"
author: ""
version: 1.1.0
contributes:
  format:
    pdf:
      variables:
        path-to-resource: "path/to/resource/"

You can then use the $path-to-resource$ in the partials with no escaped underscore.