Line breaks in HTML and PDF

[johnkerl]

Description

In a book-format Quarto document, I want the option to occasionally insert a snippet of poetry quotes. I want the line breaks to be respected. I render to HTML and PDF.

Things I've tried:

• Double-spacing: e.g.

Line one goes here;

Line two as well

Minus: I would like the content to be single-spaced.

• Use <br> tags, e.g.

Line one goes here;
<br>Line two as well

Minus: while this renders beautifully in HTML, in PDF rendering the line breaks are not produced.

• Use pre-formatted, with triple-backtick or indent

Minus: This shows the content in fixed-with font, which I would rather not.

Does anyone have advice?

(I searched in Discussions before posting; my apologies if this is already answered there and I missed it in my searching.)

[mcanouil]

I don't understand what you want to do, but that's a markdown question which is not specific to Quarto as GitHub also uses markdown for example.

Line breaks: double space or any number greater than two spaces (or \).
Paragraph breaks: one empty line.
See https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.

PS: your post is very confusing because it does not really show what you tried and/or the expected results.
Also I do not understand what those "minus" sentences are supposed to mean.

[lmoresi]

It's common to want to write a quote that is formatted (font, linespacing) as regular text but has the original line breaks (and not with each line being a separate paragraph). I just needed exactly this to include a song lyric in a class exercise.

I think the closest in quarto's flavour of markdown is the Line Block

| Line Block
| Spaces and newlines
| are preserved

Which is not rendered by GFM in this comment, but is here: https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/markdown-basics.html#other-blocks

[johnkerl]

Nice, thank you @lmoresi !! 😎