Quarto Post-Render: Enrich PDF Files with DOCX Titles

A post-render function for Quarto projects that processes rendered PDF output files. For each PDF, it checks if a corresponding DOCX file with the same base name exists, extracts the title from the DOCX document properties, sets it as the PDF metadata title, and updates the link text in the accompanying index.html.

Usage

quarto_pdf_post_render(
  output_files = strsplit(Sys.getenv("QUARTO_PROJECT_OUTPUT_FILES"), "\n")[[1L]]
)

Arguments

output_files

Character vector of output file paths from Quarto. Defaults to the QUARTO_PROJECT_OUTPUT_FILES environment variable (newline-separated paths set by Quarto during project render). If that variable is empty, falls back to reading from stdin as provided by Quarto's post-render hook.

Value

Invisible NULL. Called for side effects.

Details

To use as a Quarto post-render script, add to _quarto.yml:

project:
  post-render:
    - "Rscript -e 'saros::quarto_pdf_post_render()'"

Processing steps for each .pdf file:

1. Checks if a .docx with the same base name exists in the same directory

2. Extracts the title from the DOCX document properties (via officer)

3. Sets the extracted title as the PDF file's metadata title (requires Ghostscript)

4. Locates index.html in the same directory as the PDF

5. Replaces the <a> link text for that PDF with the extracted title

System Requirements

Setting PDF metadata title requires Ghostscript to be installed and available on the system PATH:

• Linux/macOS: gs

• Windows: gswin64c or gswin32c

If Ghostscript is not found, a warning is issued and only the HTML link text update is performed.

See also

extract_docx_title() for the DOCX title extraction logic.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Called automatically by Quarto post-render, or manually:
quarto_pdf_post_render(c("_site/report/report.pdf"))
} # }