How to access website.title from _quarto.yml in a meta shortcode?

[mark-andrews]

Description

I raised this question on Posit community forum but because I got no response in around 4 days, I assume the question is a bit too niche for that forum. Also, from what I can tell, this has not be raised before in other Issues or Discussions here.

I am using shortcodes in Quarto to try to access attributes in the _quarto.yml file. This works for some attributes and not others.

Let's say I have simple Quarto project with just two files:

_quarto.yml
index.qmd

The contents of _quarto.yml are:

project:
  type: website

website:
  title: "foobaz"

tmp:
  something: "Something something"

Note that I made my own new attribute, for testing purposes, tmp.something. Sorry about the names, by the way.

The contents of index.qmd are

---
title: "The index page of the foobaz website"
---

This is the title from this page's header: "{{< meta title >}}".

I can access the `tmp.something` in `_quarto.yml`: "{{< meta tmp.something >}}". 

But I can not access {{< meta website.title >}}.

If I render this, in the console output, I get

WARNING (C:/PROGRA~1/RStudio/RESOUR~1/app/bin/quarto/share/filters/main.lua:17477) Unknown meta key website.title specified in a metadata Shortcode.

And the rendered html is

The index page of the foobaz website
This is the title from this page’s header: “The index page of the foobaz website”.

I can even access the tmp.something in _quarto.yml: “Something something”.

But I can not access ?meta:website.title.

From this demo, I can access the title in the yaml header of the index.qmd itself, and I can access something from _quarto.yml, namely the tmp.something. But I can not access website.title from _quarto.yml.

I am very puzzled by this because it seems like such as basic requirement, i.e. to access top level attributes like the website's title and so on.

I have tested on Linux (Arch) and Windows (11). I have tested in RStudio (2024-09-0 375 ;R: 4.4.1) and in the OS terminal. I am using Quarto 1.5.57.

[cscheid]

That's not currently possible in Quarto.

[mark-andrews]

Thank you. But just out of general interest, why is it not possible, but other keys in _quarto.yml (like "tmp" in my example) are?

The reason why I assumed it must be accessible is because when Quarto makes bibtex references for my blog posts, the url in the bibtex entry is composed of 'website.site-url' from _quarto.yml, plus the relative path of the blog post. In other words, that site-url nested key under the website key in _quarto.yml is being used somehow by Quarto to automatically generate the bibtex entry.

[cscheid]

Because some of the metadata is resolved in the Typescript part of Quarto, and some of it is in Lua (inside Pandoc). Shortcodes are part of the latter, and website is part of the former. It's something we need to improve, but it's not an easy thing to do, so no concrete timeline to share.

[mark-andrews]

Thanks for the explanation. I can easily work around the problem I was facing by using information in _variables.yml. But I first wanted to make sure that I was not fundamentally misunderstanding how shortcodes etc worked.