Word gives 'unreadable content' error when trying to open a Quarto-rendered book

[friendly]

Description

First, I greatly appreciate the help of Posit/Quarto staff and the community in solving problems and responding
to requests from users. You guys & gals are amazing!!

I'm working on a book project in RStudio (2022.07.2 Build 576) using quarto (v. 1.1.189) and pandoc (v. 2.19.2).
I am trying to compile to docx.

My _quarto.yml file looks like this:

project:
  type: book

book:
  title: "Visualizing Multivariate Data and Models in R"
  author:
    - name: Michael Friendly
      url: https://datavis.ca
      affiliation: Department of Psychology<br>York University
  date: today
  cover-image: images/cover-ellipse.jpg
  favicon: images/favicon/favicon.ico
  ...

   chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - intro.qmd
    - getting_started.qmd
	...

format:
  html:
    html-math-method: mathjax
    theme: cosmo
    code-link: true
	...

  docx:
    toc: true
    toc-depth: 2
    number-sections: true
    highlight-style: github
    code-link: true
	...	

when I use Render Book > MS Word Format, there are no errors (except for an unresolved cross reference).
Here is what appears in the Build console

pandoc 
  to: docx
  output-file: Visualizing-Multivariate-Data-and-Models-in-R.docx
  toc: true
  number-sections: true
  default-image-extension: png
  toc-depth: 2
  
metadata
  crossref:
    chapters: true
  bibliography:
    - bib/references.bib
    - bib/R-refs.bib
    - bib/packages.bib
  biblio-style: apalike
  link-citations: true
  page-footer: 'Copyright 2022, Michael Friendly'
  knitr:
    opts_chunk:
      fig.path: figs/
  title: Visualizing Multivariate Data and Models in R
  author:
    - name: Michael Friendly
      url: 'https://datavis.ca'
      affiliation: Department of Psychology<br>York University
  date: '2023-08-16T00:00:00-04:00'
  
WARNING: Unable to resolve crossref @sec-mlevene
Output created: _book\Visualizing-Multivariate-Data-and-Models-in-R.docx

I try to open the resulting .docx file, and I get the error shown in the screenshot below.

I click Yes to try to recover the contents of the document, and I get a new error panel, below

There are no permissions or disk space problems, and as suggested, I try to Open the file using Text Recovery, and still get the same error. I have tried this on several machines, with the same result.

I've examined the troubleshooting guide, but there is nothing that
seems relevant. In particular, I can't tell if this is a problem from Quarto or pandoc.

What can I do to track down and fix this problem?

[mcanouil]

If you can, it would be better to upgrade to 1.3.
If you followed the troubleshooting guide without success, we could try to investigate, but for that we need a small reproducible (not) working example. In this case, a Git repository would do.

To note, Word support by Pandoc is not as advanced as for LaTeX and HTML.

[friendly]

Thx Mickael for this tip.

For others reading this thread, upgrading Quarto version is not at all like upgrading an R package, and I had to Google to find out how.

• There is an RStudio discussion of this issue.
• From this, I downloaded the latest stable Quarto for Windows

I'll do this, and try again.

My GitHub repo is: https://github.com/friendly/Vis-MLM-quarto

[mcanouil]

upgrading Quarto version is not at all like upgrading an R package

Indeed, but it's exactly as any software on any distribution:

• without a package manager: download and install the latest
• with a package manager (chocolatey, homebrew, etc.): update the tool using the appropriate package manager command.

[friendly]

Installed Quarto 1.3 and tried to re-build the .docx file. I get the same errors as before.

This is not an issue I know how to make a minimal non-working example from.
Could someone take a look at my repo, https://github.com/friendly/Vis-MLM-quarto ?

[rgaiacs]

Dear @friendly,

start by commenting all the chapters except references.qmd, https://github.com/friendly/Vis-MLM-quarto/blob/master/_quarto.yml#L30-L42. Then, uncomment one and only one chapter and render (use Render Book > MS Word Format) your project. This will help you discover which .qmd file is causing the problem and for us to be able to help you.

[friendly]

Thankd for the suggestion.
Quarto needs an index.qmd, so I commented out all but this. Quarto runs fine.
I get the same errors when trying to open the file in Word.

[mcanouil]

Could you share that single small index.qmd?
Your project has too many things ti figure out the root cause of the problem, so yo have to remove parts to end with a small example as suggested.

To note, it might be related to:

• Run a docx validator ahead of providing output #6365
• callout with table produces problem in docx #6357