Powerpoint slide layout issues

[ahcombs]

I have:

• searched the issue tracker for similar issues
• installed the latest version of Quarto CLI
• formatted my issue following the Bug Reports guide

Bug description

Basically, I need more control over how Quarto chooses slide layouts. In particular, "Content with Caption" gets invoked all the time when I would rather use "Title and Content." I want to either be able to delete "Content with Caption" from my pptx template, so that it is never used, or to be able to specify on a slide level that I want "Title and Content," to override the default choice made by the slide writer. As it is, I have been unable to find an easy workaround to invoke "Title and Content" or avoid "Content with Caption."

I tried addressing this by changing the powerpoint template. Specifically, I tried duplicating the slide master for "Title and Content" and renaming it "Content with Caption", and removing the original "Content with Caption" master. But I get a "Could not find a 0th placeholder of type body" error when I try to compile. It seems that the writer requires the Content with Caption template to include a plain text box that does not display bullets, and by default puts the text in that text box. I can move and resize the title and text boxes in the Content with Caption master, but I cannot delete the problematic text box.

As background: I have a large number of Quarto slides that I previously compiled to HTML using RevealJS. Because of new digital accessibility requirements put into place by my university, I need to instead render them to pptx. All display correctly as HTML, but I am having a hard time converting over to pptx in part because of this significant difference in how slide layouts are generated. I provide this additional detail because I suspect I am not the only Quarto user who suddenly needs to use pptx--I would certainly appreciate it if smoothing out the process of switching between file formats was a priority, and others might too!

This previously submitted issue presented this problem, but went unanswered.

Steps to reproduce

---
title: "Slide layout demo"
format: 
  pptx:
    slide-level: 2
---

## Unwanted Content with Caption

- I want this to display three bullet points and then the image below them (Title and Content layout), as it would in HTML
- But instead I get the Content with Caption layout, which puts text and image side by side
- And, to boot, it omits the bullets

![](elephant.png)

Actual behavior

Here is the resulting powerpoint file.
contentwithcaption.pptx

Expected behavior

---
title: "Slide layout demo"
format: html
---

## What I want: bullets followed by an image

- If I instead render to html, I get the layout I want.
- Three bullets, bullet points included
- Image below text

![](elephant.png)

Here is the resulting file: contentwithcaption_html.html

Your environment

IDE: Positron 2025.10.1 build 4
OS: MacOS Tahoe 26.2

Quarto check output

Quarto 1.8.26
[✓] Checking environment information...
Quarto cache location: /Users/combs.494/Library/Caches/quarto
[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
Pandoc version 3.6.3: OK
Dart Sass version 1.87.0: OK
Deno version 2.3.1: OK
Typst version 0.13.0: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
Version: 1.8.26
Path: /Applications/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking tools....................OK
TinyTeX: (not installed)
Chromium: (not installed)

[✓] Checking LaTeX....................OK
Using: Installation From Path
Path: /Library/TeX/texbin
Version: 2024

[✓] Checking Chrome Headless....................OK
Using: Chrome found on system
Path: /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome
Source: MacOS known location

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
Version: 3.9.6
Path: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/python3
Jupyter: 5.8.1
Kernels: python3

(/) Checking Jupyter engine render....Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Applications/quarto/share/jupyter/jupyter.py", line 20, in
from notebook import notebook_execute, RestartKernel
File "/Applications/quarto/share/jupyter/notebook.py", line 20, in
from nbclient import NotebookClient
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'nbclient'
WARN: Error encountered when rendering files
[✓] Checking Jupyter engine render....OK

[mcanouil]

There was no need to open a new issue about the exact same topic.

My reply still holds and the documentation still has the current behaviour described and explained.

Also, please do read the documentation about making a template for PowerPoint (or Word): https://quarto.org/docs/presentations/powerpoint.html#slide-layouts

Note that this is Pandoc doing the job of writing to PowerPoint: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#powerpoint-layout-choice

• Why two columns but not three? format:Pptx jgm/pandoc#5258

[ahcombs]

Thanks for your response. I have read the documentation on pptx templates, which helped me determine that the behavior is being caused by the Content with Caption layout. However, the documentation doesn't give any way to change this behavior short of redesigning the slide, which is not an option in many of my cases.

I understand that Pandoc is doing the writing, and I understand pptx is a limited format with limited flexibility. But there must be some kind of workaround, at least for this small piece of the issue, no? I'd even be happy if there was some kind of trivial inclusion I could make in a slide to force it to not match Content with Caption and instead match Title and Content (e.g., the previous poster's non-breaking space idea).

[mcanouil]

Changing the current behaviour requires a complete change in how Pandoc does work with PowerPoint or for Quarto to completely reimplement it from scratch.
Because it happens at the very last step when Pandoc writes to OpenXML.

One workaround I can think of, which is far from trivial and cannot really be generalised without a proper not trivial design, is to emit raw OpenXML code as your slide.
An alternative is the "officeverse" by David Gohel which is a pretty big project to map OpenXML with R functions (https://ardata-fr.github.io/officeverse/).

Maybe, using the layout* div syntax can trick Pandoc, or any div to encapsulate your content.

::: {layout="[[1],[1]]"}

::: {layout-ncol="1"}

In my opinion, the safest way to get accessible documents would be to use Typst with a "presentation" format (for example, https://github.com/skriptum/diatypst). Quarto 1.9 will have Typst 0.14 which brings a lot of accessibility features which can make PDF validates UA-1 at least.

I'm not a Quarto maintainer, but I doubt the time and manpower required to design a whole system to allow any custom layout for PowerPoint is doable in a short/mi-term at least.
If you feel like diving in OpenXML and Lua filter, maybe there is a way there (be aware that this can be a very deep rabbit hole).

[remlapmot]

Out of interest why doesn't your University accept HTML slides as accessible? Mine does. It surely can't be on the basis of accessibility score because HTML can achieve just as high accessibility scores (90-100%) - if not higher - on accessibility checkers as Powerpoint does (e.g., alt text for figures, heading levels etc). Within our Blackboard system I have lots of Quarto-revealjs HTML slide decks which achieve a 100% score.

Also it's worth knowing that if you need an accessible pdf from revealjs HTML slides go to pdf export mode e then do a print | Save as PDF within Chrome and (remarkably) Chrome preserves the accessibility features.