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Page-level repo-actions: true ignored

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A page sets repo-actions: true, a placement request Quarto 2 does not implement; the actions still render in the footer.

Q-13-13 — Page-level repo-actions: true ignored

A page’s front matter sets repo-actions: true. This key does not enable repository actions — the action list always comes from website.repo-actions — it asks only that a page with no table of contents show the actions in the margin rather than the page footer. Quarto 2 does not implement that placement, so the value is ignored and the actions render in the page footer at every width.

What this means

repo-actions: true in a page’s front matter is easy to read as “turn the actions on for this page”. It is not: the list of actions always comes from the site configuration, and a page-level true cannot add actions that the site has not configured.

What it does request is a placement change. Normally the actions render twice — once at the foot of the page’s table of contents, and once in the page footer as the small-screen fallback. On a page with no table of contents there is nowhere to put the first copy, and repo-actions: true asks for it to go in the right margin instead.

Quarto 2 does not implement that margin placement. The value is ignored, and the page’s actions render in the footer, visible at every width. Nothing is lost but the margin position.

Why this happens

Common causes:

  • Reading true as an enable switch. The false value does work as a switch — it suppresses the actions for one page — so true reasonably looks like its opposite.
  • A page ported from Quarto 1 that used the margin placement.

How to fix

Remove the key. The actions already render:

---
title: My page
---

To suppress the actions on a single page, false is supported:

---
title: My page
repo-actions: false
---

To change which actions appear site-wide, edit _quarto.yml:

website:
  repo-url: https://github.com/owner/repo
  repo-actions: [edit, issue]