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Pandoc Exited With An Error

pandoc
The pandoc subprocess exited with a nonzero status while producing this document.

Q-20-3 — Pandoc Exited With An Error

The pandoc subprocess exited with a nonzero status. Its stderr is reproduced verbatim below, including any Lua filter traceback.

What this means

Quarto shelled out to pandoc to produce this document, and the pandoc process itself failed — it did not exit successfully, so no output file was written. Quarto reproduces the pandoc process’s own stderr output verbatim in this diagnostic, because that text (often a Lua stack traceback) is the most direct description of what actually went wrong.

Why this happens

  • A Lua filter crashed while processing the document — the traceback in the stderr text usually names the failing filter file and line.
  • The document’s Pandoc-JSON representation is malformed in a way pandoc’s reader rejects.
  • A required filter parameter was missing or malformed, and a Lua filter indexed it unconditionally.

How to fix

Read the reproduced stderr text closely — it names the failing Lua file and line, which usually identifies the cause directly. If the traceback points into Quarto’s own vendored filter tree rather than your document, this is likely a Quarto bug; please file an issue with the full diagnostic text.