Trouble with description environment in custom latex

[fuhrmanator]

For my book, I need to have a second title page with ISBN, CC BY License, etc. according to some editorial standards.

The best solution I could find was to use the include-before-body in pdf and html formats. It's a bit redundant, because I have to present the same info, but in latex/html (the included info). I think it would be good for Quarto if in the future, books could have this structure, as a second page is pretty common.

Now, I have a question because when I defined this in LaTeX, I am having trouble with indentation in the \begin{description} environment. Here's a screen grab of the PDF output:

When I run my code in Overleaf, the two red lines are the same. That is, the first lines of the \item[]s are not indented, which is how the editorial standards request I do it. I've tried tweaking the labelindent=0cm, but Quarto spews errors about compilation failed- missing packages (automatic installed disabled) LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item.

Here's a MWE for the second page used by include-body-before:

\noindent Words are here.

\begin{description}[labelindent=0cm,leftmargin=1cm]
  \item [Ce manuel]est utilisé dans le cadre du cours \emph{Analyse et
conception de logiciels (LOG210)} à l'École de technologie supérieure
(ÉTS).
\end{description}

I'm guessing somewhere Quarto has redefined the description environment and those options aren't legal anymore, but I couldn't find where. If anyone has some hints, I would be very grateful.

[mcanouil]

You are talking about two different things which is not the best, i.e, a feature request and a question about a problem.
I recommend you separate the feature request from your issue if you want it to be seen as is.

Could you share a minimal (not) working example? Currently, others and/or I have to try to write an example to reproduce while you already have one ...

[fuhrmanator]

Alright, while trying to make a MWE for the unusual indentation, I found the problem.

  pdf:

    pdf-engine: pdflatex
    classoption: 
      # pass french to book class (babel will see it automatically)
      - french

Turning off the - french option fixes the problem (although I need that for my book project). This bug is out of the scope of Quarto, so we can call this discussion resolved.

I will try to find the other discussion about book structure and add the comment about the second page there.

[fuhrmanator]

Here are more details. I scanned the documentation for French babel (in French), and there is a lot of discussion about how indentation of lists is modified.

I added to the template.tex (which I load in my _quarto.yml) the following line, just after the loading of babel:

\setlength{\descindentFB}{0cm}

It solves the problem in Quarto, at least for the case I mentioned in my first question.