`output-file` parameter follows file location, not project (`_quarto.yml`) location.

[Victor-Botelho]

Bug description

Rendering outputs to parent directories using the output-file metadata parameter is not intuitive. Suppose I have the following structure:

.
|____quarto_files
| |____example.qmd
|_____quarto.yml

and in the example.qmd header I've set output-file: TUTORIAL.

Desired output when running quarto render from the projects' root directory is the following, with TUTORIAL.md in the projects' root directory:

.
|____quarto_files
| |____example.qmd
| |____TUTORIAL_files
|____TUTORIAL.md
|_____quarto.yml

But achieved output is the following, with TUTORIAL.md original location being used as reference, meaning it is created inside the quarto_files directory:

.
|____quarto_files
| |____TUTORIAL.md
| |____example.qmd
| |____TUTORIAL_files
|_____quarto.yml

The only way to achieve the desired output is by setting example.qmd header such that output-file: ../TUTORIAL. I understand how this isn't necessarily wrong, but since I have set execute-dir: project, this seems inconsistent.

VERSIONS
Quarto: 1.1.149
OS: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS

Checklist

• Please include a minimal, fully reproducible example in a single .qmd file? Please provide the whole file rather than the snippet you believe is causing the issue.
• Please format your issue so it is easier for us to read the bug report.
• Please document the RStudio IDE version you're running (if applicable), by providing the value displayed in the "About RStudio" main menu dialog?
• Please document the operating system you're running. If on Linux, please provide the specific distribution.

[petrelharp]

It's not clear to me this is a bug: it makes sense (to me?) that paths should be relative to the location of the document they are written in. And, IIUC, when doing quarto render path/to/file.qmd the working directory of the resulting job is path/to, which is consistent with this.

[mcanouil]

Here a complete depiction: https://github.com/mcanouil/quarto-issues-experiments/tree/main/quarto-cli-2171#readme

Originally from:

• Output directory in quarto-cli #2171