HTML Basics

Overview

Use the html format to create HTML output. For example:

---
title: "My document"
format:
  html:
    toc: true
    html-math-method: katex
    css: styles.css
---

This example highlights a few of the options available for HTML output. This document covers these and other options in detail. See the HTML format reference for a complete list of all available options.

Table of Contents

Use the toc option to include an automatically generated table of contents in the output document. Use the toc-depth option to specify the number of section levels to include in the table of contents. The default is 3 (which means that level-1, 2, and 3 headings will be listed in the contents). For example:

toc: true
toc-depth: 2

Use the toc-expand option to specify how much of the table of contents to show initially (defaults to 1 with auto-expansion as the user scrolls). Use true to expand all or false to collapse all.

toc: true
toc-expand: 2

You can customize the title used for the table of contents using the toc-title option:

toc-title: Contents

If you want to exclude a heading from the table of contents, add both the .unnumbered and .unlisted classes to it:

### More Options {.unnumbered .unlisted}

The HTML format by default floats the table of contents to the right. You can alternatively position it at the left, or in the body. For example:

format:
  html:
    toc: true
    toc-location: left

If you would like to display a table of contents both in the body and floating left or right, you can specify left-body or right-body respectively.

The floating table of contents can be used to navigate to sections of the document and also will automatically highlight the appropriate section as the user scrolls. The table of contents is responsive and will become hidden once the viewport becomes too narrow. See an example on the right of this page.

Note that the toc-location option is not available when you disable the standard HTML theme (e.g. if you specify the theme: none or theme: pandoc option).

Section Numbering

Use the number-sections option to number section headings in the output document. For example:

number-sections: true

Use the number-depth option to specify the deepest level of heading to add numbers to (by default all headings are numbered). For example:

number-depth: 3

To exclude an individual heading from numbering, add the .unnumbered class to it:

### More Options {.unnumbered}

CSS Styles

To add a CSS stylesheet to your document, just provide the css option. For example:

format:
  html: 
    css: styles.css

Using the css option works well for simple tweaks to document appearance. If you want to do more extensive customization see the documentation on HTML Themes.

LaTeX Equations

By default, LaTeX equations are rendered using MathJax. Use the html-math-method option to choose another method. For example:

format:
  html:
    html-math-method: katex

You can also specify a url for the library to load for a given method:

html-math-method:
  method: mathjax
  url: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js"

Available math rendering methods include:

Method Description
mathjax Use MathJax to display embedded TeX math in HTML output. The default configuration for MathJax is tex-chtml-full.js which loads all MathJax’s extensions except colorv2 and physics (available using \require{physics}).
katex Use KaTeX to display embedded TeX math in HTML output.
webtex Convert TeX formulas to <img> tags that link to an external script that converts formulas to images.
gladtex Enclose TeX math in <eq> tags in HTML output. The resulting HTML can then be processed by GladTeX to produce images of the typeset formulas and an HTML file with links to these images.
mathml Convert TeX math to MathML.
plain No special processing (formulas are put inside a span with class="math").

Note that there is more detailed documentation on each of these options in the Pandoc Math Rendering in HTML documentation.

Tabsets

You can use tabsets to present content that will vary in interest depending on the audience. For example, here we provide some example code in a variety of languages:

fizz_buzz <- function(fbnums = 1:50) {
  output <- dplyr::case_when(
    fbnums %% 15 == 0 ~ "FizzBuzz",
    fbnums %% 3 == 0 ~ "Fizz",
    fbnums %% 5 == 0 ~ "Buzz",
    TRUE ~ as.character(fbnums)
  )
  print(output)
}
def fizz_buzz(num):
  if num % 15 == 0:
    print("FizzBuzz")
  elif num % 5 == 0:
    print("Buzz")
  elif num % 3 == 0:
    print("Fizz")
  else:
    print(num)
public class FizzBuzz
{
  public static void fizzBuzz(int num)
  {
    if (num % 15 == 0) {
      System.out.println("FizzBuzz");
    } else if (num % 5 == 0) {
      System.out.println("Buzz");
    } else if (num % 3 == 0) {
      System.out.println("Fizz");
    } else {
      System.out.println(num);
    }
  }
}
function FizzBuzz(num)
  if num % 15 == 0
    println("FizzBuzz")
  elseif num % 5 == 0
    println("Buzz")
  elseif num % 3 == 0
    println("Fizz")
  else
    println(num)
  end
end

Create a tabset via a markdown div with the class name panel-tabset (e.g. ::: {.panel-tabset}). Each top-level heading within the div creates a new tab. For example, here is the markdown used to implement the first two tabs displayed above:

::: {.panel-tabset}
## R

``` {.r}
fizz_buzz <- function(fbnums = 1:50) {
  output <- dplyr::case_when(
    fbnums %% 15 == 0 ~ "FizzBuzz",
    fbnums %% 3 == 0 ~ "Fizz",
    fbnums %% 5 == 0 ~ "Buzz",
    TRUE ~ as.character(fbnums)
  )
  print(output)
}
```

## Python

``` {.python}
def fizz_buzz(num):
  if num % 15 == 0:
    print("FizzBuzz")
  elif num % 5 == 0:
    print("Buzz")
  elif num % 3 == 0:
    print("Fizz")
  else:
    print(num)
```

:::

Tabset Groups

If you have multiple tabsets that include the same tab names, you can define a tabset group. Tabs within a group are all switched together (so in the example above once a reader switches to R or Python in one tabset the others will follow along). For example:

::: {.panel-tabset group="language"}
## R

Tab content

## Python

Tab content
:::

Self Contained

HTML documents typically have a number of external dependencies (e.g. images, CSS style sheets, JavaScript, etc.). By default these dependencies are placed in a _files directory alongside your document. For example, if you render report.qmd to HTML:

Terminal
quarto render report.qmd --to html

Then the following output is produced:

report.html
report_files/

You might alternatively want to create an entirely self-contained HTML document (with images, CSS style sheets, JavaScript, etc. embedded into the HTML file). You can do this by specifying the embed-resources option:

format:
  html:
    embed-resources: true

This will produce a standalone HTML file with no external dependencies, using data: URIs to incorporate the contents of linked scripts, style sheets, images, and videos. The resulting file should be self contained, in the sense that it needs no external files and no net access to be displayed properly by a browser.

Anchor Sections

Hover over a section title to see an anchor link. Enable/disable this behavior with:

format:
  html:
    anchor-sections: true

Anchor links are also automatically added to figures and tables that have a cross reference defined.

Smooth Scrolling

Enable smooth scrolling within the page. By default, smooth scroll is not enabled. Enable/disable it with:

format:
  html:
    smooth-scroll: true

Reference Popups

If you hover your mouse over the citation, footnote and cross-reference in this sentence you’ll see a popup displaying the reference contents:

   Hover over Xie (2015) to see a reference to the definitive book on knitr1. Listing 1 shows you how to disable hover behaviour.

This behavior is enabled by default. You can disable it with the following options:

Listing 1 
format:
  html:
    citations-hover: false
    footnotes-hover: false
    crossrefs-hover: false

Commenting

This page has commenting with Hypothes.is enabled via the following YAML option:

comments:
  hypothesis: true

You can see the Hypothesis UI at the far right of the page. Rather than true, you can specify any of the available Hypothesis embedding options as a sub-key of hypothesis. For example:

comments:
  hypothesis: 
    theme: clean

You can enable Utterances commenting using the utterances option. Here you need to specify at least the GitHub repo you want to use for storing comments:

comments:
  utterances:
    repo: quarto-dev/quarto-docs

You can also specify the other options documented here.

You may also enable Giscus for commenting using the giscus option. Giscus will store comments in the ‘Discussions’ of a Github repo.

comments:
  giscus: 
    repo: quarto-dev/quarto-docs

Like utterances, you need to specify at least the Git repo you want to use for storing comments. In addition, the repo that you use must:

  1. Be public

  2. Have the Giscus app installed.

  3. Have discussion enabled

Review the Giscus documentation for instructions on setting up Giscus in your repository. Additional options are covered here.

Disabling Comments

If you have comments enabled for an entire website or book, you can selectively disable comments for a single page by specifying comments: false. For example:

title: "Home Page"
comments: false

Includes

If you want to include additional content in your document from another file, you can use the include-in-* options:

Option Description
include-in-header Include contents of file, verbatim, at the end of the header. This can be used, for example, to include special CSS or JavaScript in HTML documents or to inject commands into the LaTeX preamble.
include-before-body Include contents of file, verbatim, at the beginning of the document body (e.g. after the <body> tag in HTML, or the \begin{document} command in LaTeX). This can be used to include navigation bars or banners in HTML documents.
include-after-body Include contents of file, verbatim, at the end of the document body (before the </body> tag in HTML, or the \end{document} command in LaTeX).

You can specify a single file or multiple files for each of these options directly, or use the file: subkey. To include raw content in the YAML header, use the text subkey. When using text:, add the | character after text: to indicate that the value is a multi-line string. If you omit file: or text:, Quarto assumes you are providing a file.

For example:

format:
  html:
    include-in-header:
      - text: |
          <script src="https://examples.org/demo.js"></script>
      - file: analytics.html
      - comments.html
    include-before-body: header.html

Minimal HTML

The default Quarto HTML output format includes several features by default, including bootstrap themes, anchor sections, reference popups, tabsets, code block copying, and responsive figures. You can disable all of these built in features at once using the minimal option. For example:

---
title: "My Document"
format:
  html:
    minimal: true
---

When specifying minimal: true you can still selectively re-enable features you do want, for example:

---
title: "My Document"
format:
  html:
    minimal: true
    code-copy: true
---

References

Xie, Yihui. 2015. Dynamic Documents with R and Knitr. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. https://yihui.name/knitr/.

Footnotes

  1. knitr is an R package for creating dynamic documents.↩︎