Caption Block Not Supported
Q-3-21 — Caption Block Not Supported
Standalone caption blocks cannot be rendered in this output format. Captions should be attached to figures or tables.
What this means
A caption is a piece of text bound to the thing it describes — a
figure, a table, a code block. The Quarto AST has a Caption
node type, but every well-formed render attaches that caption to
its parent before the writer runs. A standalone caption is one
that lost (or never had) its parent, and the writer has no
target to associate it with.
Why this happens
Two known triggers:
- A Lua filter dropped the parent. The filter removed a figure or table but left its caption behind in the document.
- A filter generated an orphan caption. The filter produced
a
CaptionBlocknode directly, without attaching it to a block.
The default Quarto pipeline does not produce orphan captions.
How to fix
If a custom filter is in use, audit it for block-removal logic that does not also drop the caption, or for caption-emitting logic that forgets to attach to a parent.
If no custom filter is in use, report the document at the Quarto issue tracker — postprocessing should have associated the caption with its block.