Add truly minimal rendering

[JosiahParry]

I would like to be able to render quarto docs to truly minimal html but am only able to get part of the way there with the following front-matter

format:
   html:
      minimal: true
      highlight-style: none
      self-contained: true

However, this still add a lot of style tags with css. Is there a way to get truly minimal rendering? e.g. pure html without the style? The idea being that I can use the rendered html in a different site perhaps one that even doesn't use bootstrap! :)

[cscheid]

@JosiahParry (tagging you here just to make sure you see that we've moved this into a discussion)

Which tags would you prefer not to see? It might be possible for you to write a post-processing script in Deno that strips tags using Deno's DOM API.

Just to temper expectations, I don't think this is very practical for us to implement, because a lot of our features use CSS for semantic annotations. For example, different floats have different classes in their captions, so they can be potentially styled differently. Multiple-column layouts are also annotated in CSS, etc.

We can't not emit those, and it would be a large engineering effort to support disabling parts of the HTML format processing at this fine-grained level.

[cscheid]

It seems that my issue is very closely related to #3933. I see that it is closed though its unclear what the resolution is.

The resolution is pointed to by the issue-closing commit. We use this a lot in Quarto, so here it is for your future reference:

The 2db5ad3... link points to the commit and the message explaining it.

Post-rendering seems like it may be useful however, the process is not documented. [...] Nor does it mention what is possible or how it might be done.

You're right that we should document example scenarios. But this is a general Deno (or Python, or R, if you're more familiar with those) script; you can do anything at all that you want. The only thing that happens is that it runs after a project rendering is finished.

[cscheid]

with an R script using rvest and xml2 for post-processing afterwards (though it may be nice to use that in the post-render section) so I'll close this.

Ok, happy to hear! You did exactly what I would in this case, except for precisely what you said, which is that you can run that script automatically after each rendering by making it a post-render script.

[JosiahParry]

I was able to read the commit message but not the typescript 😅 so back at square one!

I understand that I can do "anything at all that [I] want" but it's not clear where to start. How do I access the result of the render? What format am I interacting with it in? Does this create some state for me to work from? Do I need to read in the rendered html and process that? Those are just some of the starting questions I have. I like to think I'm not a complete novice! But its also hard to get started when the docs don't necessarily tell you where or how to begin

[cscheid]

I understand that I can do "anything at all that [I] want" but it's not clear where to start. How do I access the result of the render? What format am I interacting with it in? Does this create some state for me to work from? Do I need to read in the rendered html and process that? Those are just some of the starting questions I have. I like to think I'm not a complete novice! But its also hard to get started when the docs don't necessarily tell you where or how to begin

This is explained in the page. We communicate with the script via environment variables: https://quarto.org/docs/projects/scripts.html#pre-and-post-render

You get that information: the project output directory, the input files, and the output files. What you do with that is entirely up to you.

[cderv]

To add some clarification about our options:

minimal: true is about Quarto features. (https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/html-basics.html#minimal-html) It should deactivate Quarto related features.

Setting highlight-style: none is needed if you don't want Pandoc's feature. Pandoc will do syntax highlighting by default, and if you don't want the Pandoc's CSS you need to opt out for sure. Quarto Style has been opt out through minimal already.

theme: none is now set by minimal: true I believe (following #3933), so no Pandoc HTML theme should be in the output document.

What you see left at #7987 (reply in thread) is just internal HTML set in the Pandoc's templates. it is in the style template

quarto-cli/src/resources/formats/html/pandoc/html.styles

Lines 178 to 197 in 6d5384b

	code{white-space: pre-wrap;}
	span.smallcaps{font-variant: small-caps;}
	div.columns{display: flex; gap: min(4vw, 1.5em);}
	div.column{flex: auto; overflow-x: auto;}
	div.hanging-indent{margin-left: 1.5em; text-indent: -1.5em;}
	/* The extra [class] is a hack that increases specificity enough to
	override a similar rule in reveal.js */
	ul.task-list[class]{list-style: none;}
	ul.task-list li input[type="checkbox"] {
	font-size: inherit;
	width: 0.8em;
	margin: 0 0.8em 0.2em -1.6em;
	vertical-align: middle;
	}
	$if(quotes)$
	q { quotes: "“" "”" "‘" "’"; }
	$endif$
	$if(displaymath-css)$
	.display.math{display: block; text-align: center; margin: 0.5rem auto;}
	$endif$

and inserted unconditionnaly for some, or based on Pandoc's feature for other

It is used in the main template.

quarto-cli/src/resources/formats/html/pandoc/template.html

Lines 8 to 10 in 6d5384b

	<style>
	$styles.html()$
	</style>

So if you want to remove that part, you need to tweak the templates (or the partial styles.html()).

minimal: true alone is not expected to opt out Pandoc's own feature.

I hope this clarifies how this works, and why you see what you see.

[mcanouil]

@JosiahParry a side note: self-contained is only maintain for retro-compatibility with old documents (before Quarto 1.1).
The correct option is embed-resources as documented in Quarto documentation.
self-contained was completely removed from Pandoc more than a year ago.
If you could edit your code to avoid future readers to use this option and think it's undocumented.