Quarto 1.9

Quarto 1.9 is out! You can get the current release from the download page.

Sharing your work just got easier with integrated Posit Connect Cloud publishing. Typst users will appreciate book project support and article layouts, while experimental PDF accessibility standards bring PDF/A and PDF/UA compliance to both LaTeX and Typst. This release also introduces LLM-friendly output for websites, the quarto use brand command for keeping your brand assets in sync, and list tables for authoring complex tables with familiar bullet syntax.

You can read about these improvements and some other highlights below. You can find all the changes in this version in the Release Notes.

Publish to Posit Connect Cloud

You can now publish documents and websites to Posit Connect Cloud directly from the command line. For example, publish your Quarto website project with:

Terminal

quarto publish posit-connect-cloud

Posit Connect Cloud is a hosted platform for sharing data applications and documents without managing your own infrastructure. It includes a free tier for unlimited static document publishing. Read more in Publishing > Posit Connect Cloud.

Improvements to Typst Support

Quarto 1.9 brings substantial improvements to Typst output, including book project support via the bundled orange-book extension, article layout options for margins and side notes, new typography options, and theorem styling with four appearance options.

There’s so much new, we’ve already written up the details in a separate Typst improvements blog post.

PDF Accessibility (Experimental)

We’re rolling out experimental support for PDF accessibility standards in 1.9. The new pdf-standard option enables PDF/A archival formats and PDF/UA accessibility compliance for both LaTeX and Typst outputs. Alt text from fig-alt attributes now passes through to PDF for screen reader support, and Typst gains support for alt text on cross-referenced equations.

Not everything works yet—look for a blog post and patch release in the coming weeks with more details and improvements.

Read more in the documentation for LaTeX and Typst.

Output for LLMs

Quarto can now generate llms.txt format output for your website, making your content more accessible to large language models and AI-powered tools.

Enable it in your website configuration:

_quarto.yml

website:
  title: "My Documentation"
  llms-txt: true

When you render your site, Quarto creates:

• An llms.txt index file at the root of your site listing all pages
• A .llms.md markdown file alongside each HTML page (e.g., guide.html gets guide.llms.md)

The markdown files contain clean versions of your content—navigation, sidebars, and scripts are stripped out; tables, code blocks, and callouts are converted to standard markdown.

Read more, including how to customize what appears in LLM output, in Websites > Output for LLMs.

quarto use brand Command

Keep your project’s brand assets in sync with an external source using the new quarto use brand command:

Terminal

quarto use brand myorg/shared-brand

The command copies brand files from a GitHub repository, local directory, or zip archive into your project’s _brand/ directory. Quarto walks you through each step—confirming trust for remote sources, creating the directory if needed, and asking whether to overwrite or remove files.

See Guide > Brand for --dry-run, --force, and other options.

List Tables

List tables provide a new syntax for creating tables with complex content—multiple paragraphs, code blocks, or nested lists—using familiar bullet syntax instead of grid table formatting:

::: {.list-table}
- - Function
  - Description

- - `sum()`
  - Add values:

    ```python
    sum([1, 2, 3])
    ```

- - `len()`
  - Count items:

    - Works on lists
    - Works on strings
:::

Function	Description
sum()	Add values: sum([1, 2, 3])
len()	Count items: Works on lists Works on strings

Each top-level bullet represents a row; nested bullets represent cells. This syntax is much easier to maintain than grid tables, especially when cells contain code or other block elements.

List tables support all the usual table features: captions, cross-references, column widths, and alignment. Thanks to Martin Fischer for the original development, with contributions from Albert Krewinkel and William Lupton.

Find all the details in Guide > Tables.

Other Highlights

• Privacy-focused features for websites:

  • A privacy-first default for cookie consent: The default for cookie consent has changed to type: express, providing opt-in consent that blocks cookies until users explicitly agree. This privacy-conscious default is designed with modern privacy regulations in mind.

  • Algolia Search Insights avoids cookies: Use Algolia Insights now uses persistent cookies only if cookie-consent is active, and the user has opted-in.

  • Use Plausible Analytics: Add privacy-friendly Plausible Analytics to websites via the plausible-analytics configuration option.

• aria-label for videos: Improve accessibility of embedded videos by providing custom descriptive labels for screen readers instead of the default “Video Player” label.

• New syntax-highlighting Option: Replaces the deprecated highlight-style (Pandoc 3.8). Supports style names, custom .theme files, none, or idiomatic for format-native highlighting.

• Metadata and brand extensions now work without a _quarto.yml project. A temporary default project is created in memory.

• Engine extensions allow replacement of the execution engine:

  • Julia is now a bundled extension instead of being built-in.
  • quarto-marimo will soon change from a filter extension to an engine extension.
  • New quarto create extension engine command.
  • New quarto call build-ts-extension command.
  • New Quarto API for engine extensions to use. (This is in flux and will not be documented for the next few releases, but there will be a dev blog post about it.)

Dependency updates:

• pandoc updated to 3.8.3
• typst updated to 0.14.2
• esbuild updated to 0.25.10
• deno updated to 2.4.5
• mermaid updated to 11.12.0

Acknowledgements

We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who contributed to this release by opening issues and pull requests:

CoryMcCartan, Data-Wise, FrankwaP, Joao-O-Santos, LukasDSauer, MBe-iUS, MarcoPortmann, MariaBarrioSchez, MateusMolina, Selbosh, ThePurox, TucoFernandes, aecoleman, amirhome61, andrewheiss, azankl, bensoltoff, bruvellu, byzheng, cbrnr, chendaniely, chi-raag, christopherkenny, coatless, cynthiahqy, darwindarak, davidskalinder, dmenne, fconil, fkgruber, fkohrt, fredguth, gadenbuie, github-actions[bot], gsathler-vi, hamgamb, herosi, icarusz, jeremy886, jkrumbiegel, jmcphers, jonas37, jorherre, jreades, jromanowska, jtbayly, juleswg23, juliasilge, kathsherratt, kusnezoff-alexander, lrrichter, lwjohnst86, maelle, matthiasbaitsch, mipmip, mstrms2000, multimeric, mvuorre, mykolaskrynnyk, nichtich, nithinmkp, nrichers, orbsmiv, paytonej, petrelharp, phongphuhanam, pm-gusmano, posit-snyk-bot, prosoitos, rabyj, sasja-san, sbwiecko, serialc, spaette, spraetor, stragu, szimmer, the-solipsist, thomasp85, yyzeng, zhe00a.

The airplane departure emoji in the listing and social card image for this post comes from OpenMoji– the open-source emoji and icon project. License: CC BY-SA 4.0