Quarto reformatting source file – can it be prevented?

[baptiste]

I'm a bit confused why Quarto reformats the original source file; can this be turned off? (Or, if I'm missing some good reasons, where can I read about the rationale?)

I noticed it when my definition list,

---
title: "test"
format: pdf
editor: visual
---

Item 1:
  ~ this is a line
  ~ this is another

Item 2:
  ~ this is a line
  ~ this is another
  

became,

---
title: "test"
format: pdf
editor: visual
---

Item 1:

:   this is a line

:   this is another

Item 2:

:   this is a line

:   this is another

I prefer the tight syntax above, and clearly it's valid since it was correctly parsed – how can I keep it?

[mcanouil]

There seems to be a confusion, when you say "Quarto reformats ...", I don't believe you actually meant that, instead I believe it's "RStudio's visual editor reformats ...".
If you really care about the markdown syntax, don't use the visual editor.

[baptiste]

I see, thanks. I hadn't realised it was connected to the visual editor, because I usually turn it off anyway. Since it happened when I reopened the file, I assumed it had been reformatted when I had rendered it, when in fact it's the visual <-> source transition that reformats it. Still, it would be nice to have the transition be a no-op in such cases (but I presume there's a technical advantage in standardising the input format into a subset of the full syntax options).

[mcanouil]

If you don't want the visual editor, then disable it in the settings and remove editor: visual which tells RStudio to use the visual editor.

[cscheid]

I think the answer is, simply, that "maintaining a perfect correspondence between two-way roundtripping visual editor + redundant concrete syntaxes that have the same AST representation is a very hard technical problem".