Pandoc markdown vs Quarto markdown?

[dense-set]

Description

The Quarto guide (Guide > Authoring > Markdown basics) mentions:

Quarto is based on Pandoc and uses its variation of markdown as its underlying document syntax.

This raises the following question: How does the markdown supported by Quarto differ from Pandoc's markdown? Or, where is this difference documented? For, all the Quarto guide shows are

examples of the most commonly used markdown syntax

suggesting that there is much more than what the page shows. Where is it?

[mcanouil]

Quarto is based on Pandoc and uses its variation of markdown as its underlying document syntax.

This raises the following question: How does the markdown supported by Quarto differ from Pandoc's markdown? Or, where is this difference documented? For, all the Quarto guide shows are

first "its" refers to Pandoc, while the second "its" refers to Quarto.
Feel free to make a PR to improve the wording.

suggesting that there is much more than what the page shows. Where is it?

See https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#markdown-variants.
Then and for example for GitHub-Flavoured Markdown, the specifications can be found at https://github.github.com/gfm/.

[mcanouil]

The variants are examples of Markdown supported by Pandoc as output formats.

There are "extension" that enable/disable syntax rules for "markdown".
This are all described in Pandoc documentation.

[dense-set]

Oh, now I seem to have understood: We have variations of John Gruber's Markdown, with Pandoc's Markdown being one of them, in which Quarto's .qmd are written.
Correct?

Secondly, what precisely, along with extensions, is the format of .qmd files? From what I read on Pandoc's documentation, the unnumbered class for headings is available via the extension header-attributes, so it must be enabled, no?

[mcanouil]

Oh, now I seem to have understood: We have variations of John Gruber's Markdown, with Pandoc's Markdown being one of them, in which Quarto's .qmd are written.
Correct?

Yes, it's correct.

Secondly, what precisely, along with extensions, is the format of .qmd files? From what I read on Pandoc's documentation, the unnumbered class for headings is available via the extension header-attributes, so it must be enabled, no?

Do you mean the following? (see https://quarto.org/docs/reference/formats/html.html#numbering)

Quarto document	HTML
--- title: "Quarto Playground" format: html number-sections: true --- This is a playground for Quarto. # Hello World Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. ## Code {.unnumbered} ```{r} 1 + 1 ``` ## Comment This is a comment.

[dense-set]

Yes, it's correct.

Thanks!

Do you mean the following?

Yes. So is the format for .qmd files actually markdown+header_attributes+...?

@mcanouil Can you say something on this?

[mcanouil]

There are a lot of processing specific to Quarto which are not defined by format/plugin.
It's Pandoc ways of working.

If you remove all Quarto feature, it's the Pandoc markdown variant.