Fancy Quarto epigraphs

This extension provides a shortcode for including nicely typeset epigraphs in Quarto documents.

This text:

{{< epigraph "Do or do not. There is no try." source="Yoda" >}}

…will appear like this:

This works in all formats. In HTML, Typst PDFs, and LaTeX PDFs there is special styling to make everything left-aligned-within-a-right-aligned box; in all other formats, epigraphs appear as standard blockquotes. See below for more details.

Installing

Run this terminal command to install the shortcode in your Quarto project:

quarto add andrewheiss/fancy-epigraphs-quarto

This will install the extension under the _extensions subdirectory. If you’re using version control, you will want to check in this directory.

Using

Shortcode

Basic epigraph:

{{< epigraph "Do or do not. There is no try." source="Yoda" >}}

Epigraph with markdown formatting in the quote and/or source:

{{< epigraph "Do or **do not**. There *is* no try." source="~~Grogu~~Yoda" >}}

Epigraph without a source:

{{< epigraph "Do or do not. There is no try." >}}

HTML-specific options

The rendered HTML follows Bootstrap’s semantic structure for blockquotes. I include it in a div with some additional Bootstrap CSS classes to make the text left-aligned within a right-aligned block that takes up 50% of the page width, resulting in HTML like this:

<div class="epigraph-wrapper clearfix">
  <figure class="text-end w-50 float-end">
    <blockquote class="blockquote">
      <p>Do or do not. There is no try.</p>
    </blockquote>
    <figcaption class="blockquote-footer">
      Yoda
    </figcaption>
  </figure>
</div>

You can adjust the CSS however you want based on these classes. As an example, _extensions/epigraph/epigraph.css will disable the left border that Bootstrap includes on blockquote elements by default.

You can either include your own custom epigraph CSS settings:

format:
  html:
    css: whatever.css

or you can use the epigraph-html format, which is the regular HTML format but with _extensions/epigraph/epigraph.css included automatically:

format:
  epigraph-html: default

PDF/LaTeX-specific options

Epigraphs are typset using the \epigraph{}{} command, which means you must enable the epigraph package. You can do this using the epigraph-pdf format, which inserts _extensions/epigraph/epigraph.tex automatically:

format:
  epigraph-pdf: default

Or you can use the regular PDF format and insert whatever settings you want:

format:
  pdf:
    include-in-header: 
      text: |
        \usepackage{epigraph}
        \setlength{\epigraphrule}{0em}
        \setlength{\beforeepigraphskip}{-2em}
        \setlength{\afterepigraphskip}{1em}

Typst-specific options

There’s nothing special to do for typst. Epigraphs will be typeset like this:

#{
  show quote: set align(left)
  show quote: set pad(left: 65%, right: 0em)
  
  quote(
    block: true,
    attribution: [Yoda]
  )[Do or do not. There is no try.]
}

Other formats

All other formats (Word, revealjs, Markdown, whatever) will typeset the epigraph as if it had been written like this:

> Quote to include
> 
> ---Source

Example

Here is the source code for a minimal example: minimal-example.qmd.

And here’s a fully annotated example: example.qmd. It looks like this when rendered:

• LaTeX: example-latex.pdf
• Typst: example-typst.pdf
• Markdown: example.md