Skip to content
quartobot

Design

This page indexes the design material. The substantive documents live in the repo itself; this site links into them rather than duplicating.

Architecture

Section titled “Architecture”

DESIGN.md is the authoritative design document. It covers:

  • What “the pattern” means concretely — six components in the order an author encounters them.
  • What already exists upstream (pandoc-manubot-cite, Quarto Manuscripts, the Venice CI pieces) so we don’t rebuild it.
  • The decisions table — why CSL JSON, why /v/<full-sha>/, why the HTML-only banner, why the sticky PR comment.
  • Quarto features quartobot gets for free.
  • Open questions still being worked through.

Prior art

Section titled “Prior art”

docs/prior-art.md inventories what already exists in this space: pandoc-manubot-cite, pandoc-url2cite, pandoc-doi2bib, Quarto Manuscripts, CiteDrive, Quarto’s visual-editor citation insert, and the existing scholarly Quarto templates we don’t compete with.

Publication plan

Section titled “Publication plan”

docs/publication-plan.md covers the framing for the JOSS paper (the contribution is the pattern, not the resolver), the target co-author list (Anthony Gitter, Daniel Himmelstein, possibly Quarto / Posit folks), and the venue strategy (JOSS first; a methods/commentary paper later if the pattern gets adopted across project types).

Conversation notes

Section titled “Conversation notes”

docs/conversation-notes.md is the thinking that produced the design — what was decided, what was explicitly ruled out, what changed our minds during the working sessions.

Citation pipeline architecture

Section titled “Citation pipeline architecture”

docs/citation-pipeline.md covers the settled architecture: _quarto.yml declares project.pre-render: quartobot resolve --from-scan . --output references.json --id-mode citation-key, the hook runs before pandoc, and pandoc-citeproc reads the resulting CSL JSON directly. No filter, no _extensions/, no quarto add step.

The architecture replaced an earlier shape that wired pandoc-manubot-cite as a Lua filter declared in _quarto.yml. Two material UX gotchas in the filter shape — manubot’s pandoc 3.x version check, and the resolver’s PATH requirement at render time — are structurally unreachable under the pre-render seam. A plugin architecture for deepening manubot’s shallow CURIE prefixes follows from the same seam.

Settled 2026-05-14 after a live end-to-end walkthrough confirmed the behavior. Templates, examples, and quartobot init all wire the pre-render hook.

The roadmap

Section titled “The roadmap”

The roadmap lives in GitHub issues, organized into three milestones:

How to contribute to the design

Section titled “How to contribute to the design”

CONTRIBUTING.md covers the mechanics. The short version: open an issue using the design proposal template, state the question, the options you considered, and the option you’d pick. Strong opinions on pattern naming, defaults, scope, or co-author strategy are all in scope.