Quarkdown Files

Added

AI agent skill

Quarkdown now ships with an agent skill, so tools can author .qd documents on your behalf.

To install on Claude Code:

:::shell
ln -s "$(quarkdown doctor get agent-skill)" ~/.claude/skills/quarkdown

See the agent skill documentation for more details.

Read environment variables

The new .env {name} function reads an environment variable from the host system, returning its value as a string or none if unset.

:::markdown
The home directory is .env {HOME}::otherwise {unknown}

process permission

A new process permission gates access to the host process environment. Reading environment variables requires this permission to be explicitly granted:

:::shell
quarkdown c main.qd --allow process

doctor command

The new quarkdown doctor command group reports information about the current Quarkdown installation:

• doctor env checks the runtime environment for possible issues.

• doctor get * commands are intended for scripting and tooling that need to introspect Quarkdown's environment:

  shell INSTALL="$(quarkdown doctor get install-dir)" ls "$INSTALL/docs"

Changed

Bundled Java runtime

The Quarkdown distribution now includes a minimal (~50MB) Java runtime, so the CLI runs out of the box without requiring a separate Java installation on your system.

Each release ships a per-platform executable (linux-x64, macos-x64, macos-aarch64, windows-x64).

Improved function call performance

Function call-heavy documents now compile faster, by extracting metadata once at function load time.

Fixed

PDF size and generation time reduction in paged documents

For paged documents, PDF generation now produces output that is:

• up to 90% smaller,
• generated up to 2x faster.

Thanks @philipredstone!

Fixed inline code inside compact footnote definitions

Compact footnotes like [^: text with `code`] were incorrectly parsed as plain text instead of footnotes. The definition pattern now allows backtick-enclosed spans inside the footnote body.

Thanks @Shreyansh-Kushwaha!

---

Sponsors

Thanks to our sponsors! 🎉

@vitto4