Profiles with different pdf format settings

[baptiste]

Description

I'm a bit confused with project profiles: in my use-case I want to switch between:

• a regular book.cls class, in the default profile
• the publisher's cursed Alon.cls class, to produce the pdf that will go to print, using a _quarto-alon.yml profile

I thought the following would do the trick:

_quarto.yml: (default profile)

project:
  type: book
  output-dir: "docs"

book:
  title: "Classy stuff"
  author: "baptiste"
  date: today
  language: "en-NZ"
  chapters:
    - "index.qmd"
    - "01-introduction.qmd"
    - "02-theory.qmd"
    - "03-applications.qmd"

bibliography: references.bib
csl: nature.csl

format:
  pdf:
    template: _tpl.tex
    highlight-style: arrow
  html:
    theme: cosmo
    css: _style.css

engine: knitr

_quarto-alon.yml:

project:
  type: book
  output-dir: "_CRC"

book:
  title: "Classy stuff"
  author: "baptiste"
  date: today
  language: "en-NZ"
  chapters:
    - "index.qmd"
    - "01-introduction.qmd"
    - "02-theory.qmd"
    - "03-applications.qmd"

bibliography: references.bib
csl: nature.csl

format:
  pdf:
    documentclass: Alon
    classoption: 11pt, Alon2, singlecolor, a4paper
    mainfont: "Minion 3"
    monofont: "Iosevka Curly Slab"
    monofontoptions: "Scale=0.86"
    linkcolor: black
    highlight-style: bw.theme
    include-after-body:
      text: |
        \printindex
    include-in-header:
       - "_fix-alon.tex"
       - "_packages.tex"
       - "_macros.tex"

engine: knitr

To my surprise, the pdf produced in _CRC with quarto render --profile alon actually used _tpl.tex and therefore ignored all the pdf settings in _quarto-alon.yml.

I thought the merging of profiles between the default _quarto.yml and _quarto-alon.yml would result in the pdf format being overwritten by the one supplied in the profile, rather than the two pdf format options being merged (which I assume is what happens here).

Is this the intended behaviour, and if so, should I adjust my strategy and have the default profile not define any pdf format output? (but that's a bit annoying, since I don't want/need to produce anything else when running --profile alon).

[mcanouil]

Well _quarto.yml is more of a default global shared settings.
Not a (default) profile.

See https://quarto.org/docs/projects/profiles.html#default-profile.

The YAML profile activated overwrites what is defined in the _quarto.yml and adds settings.
You don't redefine template on your "alon" profile, thus it stays.

[baptiste]

True, but I oversimplified my description: I actually have three yaml files, _quarto.yml, _quarto-book.yml, _quarto-alon.yml, and while I should add

profile:
  default: book

in _quarto.yml to really make it a "default" profile, it still leaves me with a choice between two non-ideal options, as I see it:

• defining a "default" pdf setting in _quarto.yml, but when it's merged with a profile's pdf option that contains a template: , all the other options are basically ignored (the _tpl.tex template is fully hardcoded and thus ignores everything else in the yaml). Is there a way to specify template: none or template: default, maybe, to nullify it?
• not defining any pdf format in _quarto.yml, but since I need to put something as a format, I end up producing output (Html, in my case) that is not needed for the _quarto-alon.yml profile.

[mcanouil]

I have to admit that I have difficulties to imagine your structure.
Would you be able to set up a repository with your setup, and describe what behaviour you are expected and the one you actually have?