A few suggestions for cross referencing and text layout

Discussed in https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions/1088

^{Originally posted by arnaudgallou June 7, 2022}
Here're a few suggestions/recommendations for possible improvements. I couldn't find easy solutions in the documentation to do what follows so I assume no proper solutions already exist.

Cross referencing

1. Being able to customize the text of the link when referencing a particular panels in a composite plot (e.g. generated by ggplot::facet_grid() or ggplot::facet_wrap()). The idea would be to have something that looks like Fig. 1A or Fig. 1A-B. I'm currently using [@fig-x]A-B which produces Fig. 1A-B but the unlinked plot tag looks ugly when the ref-hyperlink option is true. I was thinking to have something like @fig-x{A} or @fig-x{A-B} to append some text to the text link.

2. Somewhat similar to the first point. I'm missing a more flexible way to customize the prefix of supplementary figue/table refs. At the moment, using the fig-prefix option adds a space between the prefix and label. A solution could be to have no space as default prefix separator so that fig-prefix: "Fig. S" would produce Fig. Sx and add a space in the prefix if need be fig-prefix: "fig. ". Alternatively, we could have a yaml option to set the prefix separator. Currently using Fig. S[-@fig-x] which has the same ugly look when enabling hyperlinks.

3. Adding a x-title-template option for figures and tables to customize the text of figure/table titles easily and with more control. We could imagine something with a placeholder for the labelling. E.g. fig-title-template: "**Fig. S{label}.**" would produce Fig. S1. I can more or less do that with title-delim and fig-title, although I don't find it very convenient. However, I cannot figure out an easy way to have the fig-labels bold. Besides, I have the same spacing problem as mentioned in point 2 for supplementary figures/tables.

4. I'm missing an easy-to-use system for cross referencing between the supplementary materials and main text. Not sure what would be a simple solution for that because I assume cross references are generated during the rendering process. Ideally, I would imagine adding a yaml option in the main text file to link all references from a specific document (e.g. appendix: supplementary.qmd) and have a new tag for supplementary figures/tables (e.g. @fig-supp-x) for easy cross referencing in the main text.

5. Adding a way to have a cross reference and citation within the same pair of brackets. E.g.: blah blah Foo (1999; Fig. 1). Probably quite specific and not very common so not sure how relevant it is.

Text layout

1. Adding a yaml option to align figure/table captions to the left/right/center. This can easily be done with some css but such a trivial thing should be done with a yaml option in my opinion.

2. Adding a yaml option to justify the text of the document. Same as above, can easily be done with a line of css but having a yaml option to do it would make sense to me.

Other

In RStudio, that would be great to have the possibility to open a file that was included in a document using the {{< include >}} shortcode by clicking on it in the visual markdown editor. E.g.:

{{< include _file.qmd >}} # click the shortcode tag to open _file.qmd in a new tab