Plans to release quarto for aarch64 (Apple silicon)

[turcotte]

Description

Hi,

Does Quarto run on Apple Silicon (aarch64), without enabling Rosetta?

The installer for Quarto is prompting me to enable Rosetta, which I am trying to avoid.

I downloaded the tar ball and was able to execute some tasks. For instance, creating the structure for a book.

However, the pandoc binary in the tar ball is "Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64". Therefore, my attempt to render the book as PDF failed, 'Bad CPU type in executable (os error 86)'.

I'm surprised by this. Am I missing something? I'm new to Quarto.

Thank you for your help and time!
Marcel

[cscheid]

Quarto 1.3 does require Rosetta, because it uses a version of Pandoc that doesn't have Apple Silicon builds. Quarto 1.4, on the other hand, does not. If you're willing to use the pre-release versions, that's the way to go.

[turcotte]

Brilliant! Thank you for the prompt response!

Just to make the answer complete.

The package (quarto-1.4.330-macos.pkg) still requires Roesetta. However, the tarball contains both binaries, x86 and aarch64, for pandoc.

With the later, I was able to successfully render the book example to PDF on my MacBook Pro M2 Max running macOS 16.6, without enabling Rosetta.

[mpf]

Can you please say how best to install using the tarball?

[teroyks]

@mpf – follow these steps:

1. Go to the more downloads page and download the Mac Tarball file.
2. Create a directory where you want to have the application (for example ~/Applications/quarto and cd to that directory.
3. Unpack the file: tar xvf ~/Downloads/{quarto-file-name}.
   If the downloaded file name ends in .gz (depends on your local settings), use tar xvzf instead of tar xvf
4. You can now run quarto from the command line with ~/Applications/quarto/bin/quarto.