Hacking Quarto Callout in LaTeX

a small customization victory

Author

Enrico Spinielli

Published

May 1, 2023

The Quarto Guide goes into details about how to define callout blocks and eventually customize them.

Of course, I was asked to change the color of the callout box, which is not out-of-the-box available. A look at the generated LaTeX file shows that quarto-callout-note-color is set as

\definecolor{quarto-callout-note-color-frame}{HTML}{4582ec}

I then tried to add a different definition using include-in-header:…but the default definitions of the callout boxes colors came after mine!

So I dug in the PDF template and saw that latest place where to set things before the LaTeX body is to provide a custom title.tex partial

...
$title.tex()$
\begin{document}
$before-body.tex()$
...

The solution: I copied the default title.tex and added my color definition. Finally I set the YAML of my Quarto document as follows:

...
  pdf:
    ...
    template-partials:
      - title.tex
...

TADA!

Reuse

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{spinielli2023,
  author = {Spinielli, Enrico},
  title = {Hacking {Quarto} {Callout} in {LaTeX}},
  date = {2023-05-01},
  url = {https://enrico.spinielli.net/posts/2023-05-01-quarto-callout-hack},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Spinielli, Enrico. 2023. “Hacking Quarto Callout in LaTeX.” May 1, 2023. https://enrico.spinielli.net/posts/2023-05-01-quarto-callout-hack.