How to render Quarto metadata in .tex partials ?

[martin-g]

Description

Hi!

I have a custom metadata in _quarto.yml:

...
mycustom: value
...

I can render it in .qmd files with: {{< meta mycustom >}} ! So far so good!

But I also need to overwrite the title.tex template with a custom one.
What is the way/syntax to render the value of mycustom metadata ?

Thanks!
Martin

[mcanouil]

Did you look at the documentation on the matter?
https://quarto.org/docs/journals/templates.html

[cderv]

If I try a simple example like this

---
title: "Quarto Playground"
format: 
  latex:
    template-partials: 
      - title.tex
mycustom: value
---

COntent

with title.tex being

\noindent {\Large \color{logodarkgrey} \fontfamily{phv}\selectfont $mycustom$ } \\

Then in the rendered .tex file I get

\hypersetup{
  pdftitle={Quarto Playground},
  colorlinks=true,
  linkcolor={blue},
  filecolor={Maroon},
  citecolor={Blue},
  urlcolor={Blue},
  pdfcreator={LaTeX via pandoc}}

\noindent {\Large \color{logodarkgrey} \fontfamily{phv}\selectfont value } \\
\begin{document}
\maketitle
COntent



\end{document}

See that value is there.

Also this example is a dummy one (no rendering probably to PDF because of error) - it is just to show the value is passed.

[martin-g]

@cderv Thanks! What command did you use to render the .tex ? If I use --to tex then Quarto fails with

ERROR: Unknown format tex

Error: Unknown format tex
    at resolveFormats (file:///opt/quarto/bin/quarto.js:83183:19)
...

My next guess is that you actually tried to render PDF (i.e. --to pdf) and told Quarto to preserve the intermediate .tex file (keep-tex) but you say no rendering probably to PDF because of error, so it sounds like you didn't try to render a PDF...

I am not sure what is wrong with my setup but I see mycustom in the intermediate .tex file too.

My Quarto version is 1.3.450.

[martin-g]

I think I found the problem!

My _quarto.yml contains:

...
format:
  pdf:
    ...
    template-partials:
      - partials/before-body.tex
     ...

and partials/before-body.tex is:

MyCustom: $mycustom$

% Title Page --------------------------------------------------------
\input{common/title}
% Disclaimer
\input{common/legal} 

\newpage
\tableofcontents
\newpage

$mycustom$ in before-body.tex is replaced with value ! This works!

But I actually need to use Quarto metadata in common/title.tex which is included in before-body.tex and there $mycustom$ is not interpolated to value!

For now my workaround is to inline title.tex into before-body.tex.

[cderv]

What command did you use to render the .tex ? If I use --to tex then Quarto fails with

This can be found in the format value. format: latex which leads to --to latex at command line. --to tex is not valid.

But I actually need to use Quarto metadata in common/title.tex which is included in before-body.tex and there $mycustom$ is not interpolated to value!

I don't understand exactly what you want to do. You may need to learn more Pandoc's Template, and how Partials works (https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#partials)

• What is common/title.tex ? If this is not a Pandoc's template, no templating expansion will happens. And I see \input{common/title} which is not a template call, but a LaTeX include of a an external tex file. Pandoc won't expand anything in it by default.

For now my workaround is to inline title.tex into before-body.tex.

This seems like a good way - or you may need to consider common/title.tex also as a Pandoc partials that should be included and expanded by Pandoc.

Overall, your question is about how Pandoc's templating is working. You should try different things to understand how that works

[martin-g]

Thank you for the clarifications, @cderv !

[TomBener]

I encountered the same problem. The value of custom metadata in before-body.tex was expanded, but the same content in title.tex didn't.

[cderv]

@TomBener did the above clarified it for you ?

If not, please open a new discussion as this one is a answered by the OP - or clarify what you are looking for in another post below.

We can just mark only one post as an answer in a discussion - so always ok to open a new discussion (possibly linking to this one)