Can Quarto really have the same branding across output formats?

Guten Tag! 👋 

Many greetings from Munich, Germany. In my last email I mentioned that you can build one Quarto document and get

• a properly branded webpage and

• a properly branded PDF out of it.

If you’re anything like me, your first reaction to that is probably something like:

Totally fair question. So let me show you that it does indeed work.

I’ve built a small demo extension around a fictional investment firm called BIRD Investment. It’s a monthly fund fact sheet with

• a logo in the header,

• a primary color in headings,

• a styled table using the primary colors, and

• a couple of highlighted numbers inside the text.

The quarto file for that can be found here:

If you look at the code, you’ll find Quarto snippets like this:

These are custom block environments and inline-style instructions. Rendered to HTML, it looks like this:

Notice how this uses brand color (in this case purple) all over the place. And the inline color also works smoothly.

And rendered to a Typst PDF, from the exact same .qmd file, it keeps

• the same logo,

• the same purple,

• the same fonts, and

• the table is also set up to let the surrounding paragraph text wrap around it instead of getting shoved onto its own page.

Sure, there are small differences. After all, a PDF has page margins that an HTML website does not have. Or a company guideline might require different font settings in websites vs. PDFs. But this doesn’t change the fact that the branding is clearly the same.

So, yes: Branding from a Quarto file with two different outputs works. And as regular readers of my newsletter know, the glue that makes all of that work is Lua. That’s exactly what I want to get into next.

Until then, quick question: when you’ve tried to get the same report working as both HTML and PDF, what broke first? Fonts, colors, or tables? Hit reply, I’m curious.

Talk soon,
Albert

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