EPUB format

Quarto can render a document to an EPUB e-book (.epub) by passing the rendered document through Pandoc’s own EPUB writer. Add epub to a document’s format:, or render directly from the command line:

quarto render book.qmd --to epub

Or in front matter / _quarto.yml:

format:
  epub:
    toc: true

The output is a standard EPUB 3 file — chapters are plain XHTML, math renders as MathML, and the file opens in any e-reader or e-reader preview app.

Splitting into chapters

Pandoc splits the document into separate chapter files at each top-level (level-1) heading by default. Use epub-chapter-level to split at a deeper heading level instead — for example, to also break out level-2 sections into their own chapter files:

format:
  epub:
    epub-chapter-level: 2

Cover image and metadata

format:
  epub:
    epub-cover-image: cover.png
    epub-metadata: metadata.xml

• epub-cover-image sets the book’s cover image (a path relative to the document, or to the project root when it starts with /).
• epub-metadata points at an XML file of additional EPUB metadata (identifier, additional contributors, series information, and so on) to merge into the generated content.opf.

Fonts and styling

format:
  epub:
    epub-embed-font: fonts/MyFont.ttf
    css: style.css

• epub-embed-font embeds a font file directly in the EPUB container so it’s available even on readers that don’t have it installed. It can be repeated to embed more than one font.
• css links an additional stylesheet into every chapter, on top of Quarto’s own callout and layout styles, which are always included.

Known limitation: tabsets

Tabbed content (::: {.panel-tabset}) renders in EPUB using the same interactive tab markup as HTML output. Most EPUB readers don’t run the JavaScript that hides the inactive tabs, so all tab panels appear expanded, one after another, rather than as a single active tab. The content itself is unaffected — nothing is dropped — but the tabbed presentation doesn’t collapse the way it does in a browser.