Quarto Extension simple-vars

Quarto supports the handy idea of variables.

In a Quarto project, the var shortcode enables you to insert content from a project-level _variables.yml file where you can keep commonly used text such as nicely formatted website links, etc. For example, if that file contains the line:

quarto: [`Quarto`](https://quarto.org)

Then, in markup, you can reference the quarto variable as follows:

The project's documentation site was built using {{< var quarto >}}.

This will be rendered as:

The project's documentation site was built using Quarto.

That is all well, but I find the Quarto shortcode syntax {{< var variable-name >}} to be pretty clunky. By contrast, AsciiDoc uses the much simpler {variable-name} to achieve the same effect.

This simple-vars extension for Quarto lets you use the AsciiDoc approach to reference the variables defined in the _variables.yml file. That earlier example becomes:

The project's documentation site was built using {quarto}.

It eliminates the need for all the extra braces, etc. Your markup is cleaner, but you still get the same output:

The project's documentation site was built using Quarto.

Installing

The command

quarto add nessan/simple-vars

installs the extension under the extensions subdirectory, which should be checked in if you use version control. Once it is installed, you add the extension as a filter in your _quarto.yml file as usual

filters:
    - simple-vars

Example

See the examples directory for demonstration projects using this extension.

Contact

You can contact me by email here.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2024-present Nessan Fitzmaurice. You can use this software under the MIT license.