Quarkdown: One Source, Four Documents — Types, Themes & Page Setup

Part 2 was about the logic under the hood. Now we look at the visible result — and at Quarkdown's biggest promise: one source, multiple outputs. A single line decides whether your .qd document becomes a flowing web page, a paginated paper, a presentation or a searchable wiki. On top of that come themes, metadata and the page format — the dials that give a document its character.

The four document types

You set the type with .doctype {…} right at the top. Each type brings its own behavior:

plain (default) — a linear flow without page breaks, a responsive layout in the style of Notion or Obsidian. Ideal for websites and knowledge management. Footnotes appear as sidenotes to the right of their reference; PDF export produces a single continuous page.
paged — a classic layout with pages. Breaks occur explicitly or automatically when content overflows. Footnotes sit at the bottom of the page. This is the type for articles, academic papers and books.
slides — a presentation, one slide per screen, horizontally centered. Slide breaks only happen explicitly. On PDF export each slide — and each fragment state — becomes its own page.
docs — a navigation-first layout with sidebars, a header with a search bar and footer navigation. Uses subdocuments and a client-side full-text search. The official Quarkdown wiki is itself a docs document.

The same content, four completely different artifacts — without touching the text. This is exactly what sets Quarkdown apart from tools that each master only one output format.

Metadata

By convention, metadata sits at the very top. It follows a "modify-or-echo" principle: with an argument it sets the value, without one it returns it (handy in running text).

.docname {My Document}
.doctype {paged}
.doclang {English}

.docauthors
    - Jean Pierre Kolb
        - email: jpk@example.com

.doclang is more than cosmetics: it determines the target locale for localization, locale-specific fonts and the HTML lang attribute — relevant for hyphenation and accessibility. .dockeywords, in turn, feeds into SEO metadata on HTML export. For a single author, the shorthand .docauthor {Name} is enough.

Themes: color is separate from layout

A theme defines the look and feel — and Quarkdown cleanly separates the color theme from the layout theme. You combine the two freely:

.theme {paperwhite} layout:{latex}

Color themes	Layout themes
`paperwhite` (default)	`latex` (default)
`darko`	`hyperlegible`
`galactic`	`minimal`
`beaver`	`beamer`

Proven combinations: paperwhite+latex (an academic LaTeX look, strong for paged), galactic+hyperlegible (the wiki's theme, with a highly readable font), darko+minimal (dark and reduced) and beaver+beamer (a Beamer style for presentations). Because color and structure are decoupled, four by four already gives sixteen starting points — custom fonts you set up additionally via .font.

The page format

.pageformat controls the geometry of the page. All parameters are optional; multiple calls stack, with later ones overriding earlier ones.

.pageformat {A4} margin:{2cm}

You can pick a named size (A0–A10, B0–B5, letter, legal, ledger) or specify width/height exactly, flip the orientation (portrait/landscape), set a background or border, and enable a multi-column layout with columns. Particularly elegant is scoped formatting in paged documents: mirrored margins for books or special formats for the first few pages.

.pageformat size:{A4}
.pageformat side:{left}  margin:{2cm 3cm 2cm 1cm}
.pageformat side:{right} margin:{2cm 1cm 2cm 3cm}

That gives left (verso) and right (recto) pages different inner and outer margins — classic book typesetting, in four lines.

FAQ

Can I switch the document type afterwards?

Yes — that's the whole point. You only change the .doctype line and recompile. Content that is type-dependent (such as page breaks or sidenotes) then behaves appropriately for the new type automatically.

Which type suits a blog or website?

plain for individual pages in a flowing-text style, docs for an entire knowledge base with navigation and search. Both export as static HTML and can be deployed directly — I cover the path there in a later part.

Do I need a specific type for a PDF?

No. Each of the four types can be exported as PDF; the result matches the respective HTML layout. A paged document becomes a multi-page PDF, a plain document a single long page, a presentation one slide per page.