markdown bulleted list in gt cell - duplicated text

[lauren-obrien]

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

In a gt table, with a column formatted using fmt_markdown(), I see unexpected text duplication when the cell contains only a bulleted (or numbered) list and no lead-in text above. This duplication doesn't appear in the viewer pane when executing the cell in RStudio, only when rendering to html.

Steps to reproduce

---
title: "reprex_gt_md"
editor_options: 
  chunk_output_type: console
---

```{r}
library(dplyr)
library(tibble)
library(gt)
```

```{r}
#| label: tbl-test
#| tbl-cap: "test"

dat_demo <-
  tribble(   
    ~Col_A,      ~Col_B,
    'A',  'Plain sentence',
    'B',  'Sentence with
    
- bullet point 1
- bullet point 2',
    'C',  '- bullet point 1
- bullet point 2',
    'D', ' 
- bullet point 1
- bullet point 2')

tbl_demo <- gt(dat_demo) |>
  tab_options(
    column_labels.font.weight = 'bold', 
    heading.title.font.weight = 'bold',
    table.align = 'center',
    table.width = '85%'
    #, quarto.disable_processing = TRUE # stops duplicate text in row C, but breaks cell stripe formatting
  ) |>
  tab_style(style = list(cell_text(color  = 'red',
                                   weight = 'bold',
                                   align  = 'center')),
            locations = cells_body(columns = 1)) |>
  fmt_markdown(columns = 2) |>
  cols_width(Col_A ~pct(10))

tbl_demo
```

Actual behavior

Text in row C, Col_B repeats itself above the two bullet points.

Expected behavior

Text in row C, Col_B should look like

• bullet point 1
• bullet point 2

not

bullet point1bullet point2

• bullet point 1
• bullet point 2

I've tried various options for whitespace placement, different bullet symbols, etc as outlined in the documentation but so far the best solution I have is in Row D, where a non-breaking space is inserted above the list. This still adds an empty line.

Your environment

• IDE: RStudio 2026.01.1 +403
• OS: Windows 11

Quarto check output

$ quarto check
Quarto 1.9.37
[>] Checking environment information...
      Quarto cache location: C:\Users\OBrienL\AppData\Local\quarto
[>] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.8.3: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.87.0: OK
      Deno version 2.4.5: OK
      Typst version 0.14.2: OK
[>] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[>] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.9.37
      Path: C:\Program Files\Quarto\bin
      CodePage: 1252

[>] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: v2024.02
      Chromium: (not installed)
      Chrome Headless Shell: (not installed)
      VeraPDF: (not installed)

[>] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: TinyTex
      Path: C:\Users\OBrienL\AppData\Roaming\TinyTeX\bin\windows\
      Version: 2023

[>] Checking Chrome Headless....................OK
      Using: Chrome found on system
      Path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe
      Source: Windows Registry

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

[>] Checking R installation...........OK
      Version: 4.5.3
      Path: C:/R/R-4.5.3
      LibPaths:
        - C:/R/R-4.5.3/library
      knitr: 1.51
      rmarkdown: 2.31

[>] Checking Knitr engine render......OK

[>] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.11.4
      Path: C:/Python311/python.exe
      Jupyter: (None)

      Jupyter is not available in this Python installation.
      Install with py -m pip install jupyter

[>] Checking Julia installation...

[mcanouil]

What's the output format?

[lauren-obrien]

html

[mcanouil]

The issue is caused by the HTML table processing which you can diable globally or at cell level with html-table-processing: none.

[mcanouil]

Smaller reprex:

---
title: "reprex_gt_md"
format: html
---

```{r}
#| label: tbl-test
#| tbl-cap: "test"
# html-table-processing: none
gt::gt(data.frame(A = "- bullet point 1\n- bullet point 2")) |>
  gt::fmt_markdown(columns = 1)
```

This leads to:

<td headers="A" class="gt_row gt_left"><span data-qmd-base64="LSBidWxsZXQgcG9pbnQgMQotIGJ1bGxldCBwb2ludCAy"><span class='gt_from_md'><ul>
<li>bullet point 1</li>
<li>bullet point 2</li>
</ul>
</span></span></td>

Which is the expected output.
The issue is that the base64 encoded markdown (data-qmd-base64) is not valid list markdown (- and \n were striped) and this leads to Quarto HTML processing to go "wrong":

• ast processing
• cell normalisation
• content extraction

[cscheid]

This isn't a Quarto bug. Note how the data-qmd-base64 attribute is inside a span, and not a div. Spans only allow inline nodes inside them; bulleted lists are blocks.

Edit: Browsers might accept this, but it's actually invalid HTML. See the HTML reference on MDN. Span nodes only allow "phrasing content" inside them, which the HTML term for "inlines". Phrasing content doesn't include bulleted lists. GT should not allow this (though, because this is Markdown, GT probably can't know). The bug in Quarto is that we also should know that this isn't valid inlines content. That's something we'll eventually fix in Quarto 2.

@lauren-obrien Unfortunately, this means that Quarto's HTML table processing can't work if you use bulleted lists in the markdown, because GT emits invalid HTML in that case. Disabling the processing as @mcanouil suggested is a workaround (although in that case you'll unfortunately also lose some Quarto features in that table.)

[cderv]

@lauren-obrien you should open an issue on https://github.com/rstudio/gt about this. Thank you !