How do I use a more recent version of Pandoc within Quarto?

[elsiehupp]

Description

Note: I am using quarto-codespaces (with the Quarto version release, whatever that means) because I want to avoid dealing with local machine weirdness.

I would like to be able to use jgm/pandoc#10574, which was merged into Pandoc on January 29, 2025. The version of Pandoc shipped within the version of Quarto I am using does not seem to include this pull.

I just ran quarto pandoc --version, and it printed pandoc 3.6.3. The current version of Pandoc is 3.8.3, which shipped on December 1, 2025. (I'm not sure which version of Pandoc the pull shipped with.)

How do I use a more recent version of Pandoc within Quarto? Can I get a more recent version of Pandoc by using a different Quarto version? Or can I manually upgrade it myself?

Thanks!

[mcanouil]

"Release" means current stable release as stated on https://quarto.org

Yes, it's possible to override the bundled version of Pandoc, but i highly suggest you don't, because you are more likely to break things than anything else.

QUARTO_PANDOC

Setting this variable to an unsupported and untested version, means you are on your own to solve the issues that will arise.

This being said 1.9 prerelease i migrating to the latest version of Pandoc.
The next version 1.9.17 (not released/scheduled) will have the latest version, but not everything is guaranteed to work until the migration is complete. (Current prerelease is 1.9.16)

[cderv]

FWIW you are interested jgm/pandoc#10574 and this was merge in commit jgm/pandoc@d680ce0 which is included in pandoc 3.6.3 from what I am seeing in the repo.

❯ git tag --contains=d680ce01001813d91911f0522effe097b4d0e862 | grep ^3.6.3
3.6.3

So using latest Quarto 1.8.27, you'll have the correct Pandoc.

❯ quarto pandoc -f markdown -t html
You can use [CSS]{.abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets"}
^Z
<p>You can use <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr></p>

So it works on my side.

The pandoc version bundled in Quarto does have the pull. So question is not how to change quarto version, but what did you try exactly in Quarto context ?

[elsiehupp]

Oh, it looks like it is working, after all. For some reason earlier it seemed to be stripping out the title="", and I'm not sure why.