Markdown 4 Quarto — Quarto-oriented authoring in VS Code’s native Markdown preview

[lsbjordao]

Hi everyone,

I’ve just published a small VS Code extension called Markdown 4 Quarto.

The idea behind it is simple:

Author in native Markdown. Publish with Quarto.

I really like Quarto as a publishing system, but for documents that are mostly prose, citations, figures, tables, equations, notes, and cross-references, I often prefer writing directly in .md files using VS Code’s native Markdown preview.

The native preview is extremely fast and integrates very nicely with the editor: synchronized scrolling, double-click navigation back to the source, selection highlighting, Markdown validation, and so on.

So instead of creating another custom preview, Markdown 4 Quarto extends the native VS Code Markdown preview with a focused set of Quarto/Pandoc-oriented features.

It currently supports:

• GitHub-style alerts (NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION);
• footnotes;
• Quarto/Pandoc-style cross-references for sections, figures, tables, and equations;
• Quarto-style equation identifiers such as $$ {#eq-model};
• BibTeX citations;
• CSL-based citation formatting;
• parenthetical, narrative, and multiple citations;
• automatic bibliography rendering;
• Quarto project variables from _variables.yml using {{< var ... >}}.

A central use case is keeping the actual prose in Markdown files:

paper/
├── index.qmd
├── _content.md
├── references.bib
└── figures/

and then using Quarto only as the document composition and publishing layer:

---
title: "My paper"
format:
  html: default
  pdf: default
  docx: default
---

{{< include _content.md >}}

This gives a workflow where we can spend most of the time writing in .md with the very responsive native VS Code experience, while still using Quarto for HTML, PDF, DOCX, metadata, styling, filters, and the rest of the publication pipeline.

The extension intentionally does not try to reproduce Quarto’s computational runtime or notebook execution. My current view is that computational chunks still belong naturally in .qmd; the extension is mostly aimed at the large amount of scientific and technical writing that does not need computation in every section.

I also tried, whenever possible, to reuse existing Quarto/Pandoc syntax instead of inventing extension-specific syntax, so that the same Markdown source can remain useful when included in a Quarto document.

The extension is now available on the VS Code Marketplace:

Markdown 4 Quarto

I’d be very interested in feedback from Quarto users, especially about:

• which Quarto authoring features would be most useful inside the native Markdown preview;
• syntax compatibility issues;
• cross-reference and citation edge cases;
• workflows involving .md files embedded into .qmd documents.

The project is still young, so suggestions and bug reports would be very welcome.

Thanks!