Other output formats

Overview

Beyond the formats with their own guides (html, revealjs, epub, typst, latex), Quarto 2 can render your document to every document format Pandoc can write — word processor files, markdown flavors, wiki markup, slide shows, XML dialects, and plain text. (docx, pptx, epub, and typst also go through Pandoc; they are covered by their own guides or are already familiar.)

Rendering to these formats requires a pandoc binary. Quarto does not bundle one — install it from pandoc.org and make sure it’s on your PATH, or point the QUARTO_PANDOC environment variable at wherever it lives. Quarto requires pandoc 3.11 or newer.

A few Pandoc writers are deliberately not exposed: the bibliography exporters (bibtex, biblatex, csljson) and opml discard the document body, so they can’t render a normal document.

Basic usage

Render a single document from the command line:

quarto render document.qmd --to org

Or set the format in the YAML front matter:

document.qmd

---
title: "My Document"
format: org
---

The formats

Word processor

Format	Output file	Notes
`odt`	`.odt`	OpenOffice/LibreOffice text document
`opendocument`	`.xml`	Flat OpenDocument XML (not zipped like `odt`)
`rtf`	`.rtf`	Rich Text Format

E-book

Format	Output file	Notes
`fb2`	`.fb2`	FictionBook 2 (XML-based e-book format)

Markdown variants

All of these produce a .md file.

Format	Notes
`markdown`	Pandoc’s extended markdown
`markdown_strict`	Original markdown, no extensions
`markdown_phpextra`	PHP Markdown Extra
`markdown_github`	Deprecated GitHub-flavored markdown (Pandoc’s)
`markdown_mmd`	MultiMarkdown
`markua`	Markua
`commonmark`	CommonMark
`commonmark_x`	CommonMark with Pandoc’s extensions
`gfm`	GitHub-Flavored Markdown (see below)

gfm uses Pandoc’s native GitHub-Flavored Markdown writer. Its output is a superset of what Quarto 1 produced: it also emits GitHub alerts, $…$ math, a YAML metadata block, and automatic identifiers on headings. (Quarto 1 emulated gfm with a frozen list of CommonMark extensions dating from 2022.)

Slide shows

Format	Output file	Notes
`s5`	`.html`	Standalone HTML deck, assets included
`dzslides`	`.html`	Fully self-contained — no external assets at all
`slidy`	`.html`	Loads its scripts/styles from the W3C CDN
`slideous`	`.html`	Standalone HTML deck, assets included

Each renders a self-contained slide deck in the browser. As with revealjs, code cells don’t echo their source by default and figures are sized for slides. For new presentations, prefer Quarto’s native revealjs format.

XML

Format	Output file	Notes
`docbook`	`.xml`	DocBook 5 (alias for `docbook5`)
`docbook4`	`.xml`	DocBook 4
`docbook5`	`.xml`	DocBook 5 (namespaced)

Plain text and wiki markup

Format	Output file	Notes
`plain`	`.txt`	Simple plain text
`rst`	`.rst`	reStructuredText
`org`	`.org`	Emacs Org mode
`muse`	`.muse`	Emacs Muse
`ms`	`.ms`	groff/troff `ms` macros
`man`	`.man`	roff man page
`texinfo`	`.texinfo`	GNU Texinfo
`tei`	`.tei`	TEI Simple (XML humanities markup)
`zimwiki`	`.zim`	Zim desktop wiki
`dokuwiki`	`.dokuwiki`	DokuWiki markup
`haddock`	`.haddock`	Haddock (Haskell documentation)
`icml`	`.icml`	Adobe InCopy/InDesign interchange
`jira`	`.jira`	Jira wiki markup
`mediawiki`	`.mediawiki`	MediaWiki markup
`xwiki`	`.xwiki`	XWiki markup
`textile`	`.textile`	Textile
`vimdoc`	`.txt`	Vim help files
`bbcode`	`.txt`	Bulletin-board forum markup

bbcode has five forum flavors with the same .txt output: bbcode_steam, bbcode_phpbb, bbcode_fluxbb, bbcode_hubzilla, and bbcode_xenforo.

Special-purpose

Format	Output file	Notes
`json`	`.json`	Dump of the processed document as Pandoc JSON
`native`	`.native`	Same, in Pandoc’s native notation
`xml`	`.xml`	Same, as Pandoc’s XML AST serialization
`ansi`	`.txt`	Plain text with terminal escape codes
`chunkedhtml`	`.zip`	Zip archive of chapter HTML files (see below)

The three AST dumps (json, native, xml) show exactly what Quarto feeds the writer after all processing — handy for debugging. ansi output is meant for a terminal: view it with cat, not a text editor.

chunkedhtml produces a .zip archive containing index.html (a navigation shell) plus one HTML file per chapter (named like 1-intro.html), with images embedded inside the archive. Unzip it and open index.html to view. A missing image is an error rather than a warning, since it has to be embedded.

Figures, tables, and cross-references

Quarto numbers figures, tables, and other floats itself, then hands the numbered result to Pandoc. The writers with native float support — odt, gfm, and the four slide-show formats — get fully numbered, captioned figures and tables.

The remaining formats have no float renderer: the figure or table still appears, but without Quarto’s usual numbering and caption treatment, and Quarto emits a warning for each affected float. (chunkedhtml falls in this group, despite producing HTML.)

Code cells and diagrams

Executed code cells include their output. The slide-show formats, which produce HTML, keep Quarto’s callout and theorem styling; every other format on this page drops it — output appears as plain blocks, the same as in docx.

Mermaid diagrams and OJS cells need JavaScript — either in the viewing browser or at render time to draw a fallback image, which Quarto 2 doesn’t do yet. They are not rendered in these formats; use html or revealjs if your document includes them.

Notes for Quarto 1 users

gfm and commonmark are now supported directly (see the markdown section above for how gfm differs from Quarto 1’s output).
Output filenames changed for three formats: djot now produces .dj, t2t produces .t2t, and xml produces .xml, where Quarto 1 named all of them .txt. (ansi, vimdoc, and the bbcode flavors still produce .txt.)
number-sections is not forwarded to the Pandoc markdown writers, so numbered sections render unnumbered in markdown output.