Custom docx template in quarto ?

[julienmalik]

Description

Hi,

I want to generate DOCX file out of my quarto projects (among other outputs like html and pdf), but respecting my company's template.

I'm quite sure I'm not the only one with that need, I see it surfaces in questions/issues but with no clear implementation path.

I have read the "ms-word-templates" doc here : https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/ms-word-templates.html
But this is limited to only styles and is not sufficient for my needs.

From what I understood pandoc has actually two different options allowing to customize the docx output :

• the --reference-doc that quarto already support and described in the "ms-word-templates" page
• the --template that allows to inject a complete custom structure for the document

This link has helped a lot : https://rnwest.engineer/auto-generate-docx-with-pandoc/

My question then : is there a way to inject the pandoc --template option when quarto builds a docx ?

Thanks

[julienmalik]

I have tried finding that default.openxml file into my quarto distribution but could not identify where it is.

Using quarto-1.9.36-linux-amd64 for now.

Could you also help me locate this in the quarto distribution ? I only see a quite big bin/tools/x86_64/pandoc 157 MB file.

[mcanouil]

Quarto CLI does not use the "template" form for docx, only the reference doc (when template is provided, it's mostly Pandoc that handles it)
Not sure template: YAML will pass on the template also for docx, as it would for all other formats, but you can try.

The template you are mentioning is Pandoc, find it on Pandoc: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/main/data/templates/default.openxml

edit: This works:

---
format:
  docx:
    template: template.xml
---

{{< lipsum 2 >}}

[cderv]

Really interesting ! We missed this pandoc feature added in Pandoc 3.2.1 jgm/pandoc@db559e1

This opens interesting possibilities to change formats defaults 🤔 Though Openxml is hard to write 😞

[mcanouil]

Though Openxml is hard to write

LLMs can read the OpenXML spec which almost no human can 😅

[julienmalik]

Damned, so easy I didn't even try it !

Thanks, this open lots of doors for customisation of the output.