How do I fix alignment in description (definition) lists for beamer output?

[felixvuo]

Description

The following code and screenshot shows how definition terms and descriptions come out misaligned. I read here that it's possible to pass the description environment in beamer a hint as to the length of the terms. Can I do the same from my qmd source?

---
title: "Stuff and Things"
author: "Me"
format: 
  beamer: 
    aspectratio: 169
    theme: Hannover
    keep-tex: true
---

# Key terms

Affirmative:
: yes, sure

Negative, long thing:
: no way, man, it's not going to happen, never, no-how

Ambivalent:
: whatever you like, it's all good, no worries, chill out, you do you, please yourself

[mcanouil]

The markdown syntax for "description" comes from Pandoc (Pandoc definition lists syntax).

You can use keep-tex: true to investigate your LaTeX document and tries various LaTeX specific solutions.

Once you do have a LaTeX solution, you can:

• use include-* to insert any LaTeX code: LaTeX Includes YAML options
• use raw block as described in Markdown Basics - raw content syntax

[cderv]

I believe this something to solve with beamer itself. Using bare pandoc leads to the same results

pandoc -t beamer -o test.pdf -f markdown index.qmd

I read here that it's possible to pass the description environment in beamer a hint as to the length of the terms.

Pandoc is responsible to write the LaTeX syntax and it does not allow passing an option to the environment
https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/49d154c769173048583dbff14dc8f1552fedec69/src/Text/Pandoc/Writers/LaTeX.hs#L598-L607

Second solution in your link post is to add to preamble, and this can be done with Quarto passing some includes
https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/pdf-basics.html#latex-includes

so you could try that.

Otherwise, for now, until pandoc support an option somehow, you would need to do it yourself.

You could write a Lua filter that would catch DefinitionList and writes directly the raw LaTeX as you want instead of Pandoc. See about Lua filter in part about Quarto Extension https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/lua.html

Hope this helps.

[felixvuo]

Thank you for the hints.

Apparently the beamer class allows a \setbeamersize{description width=XXX} command, https://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf#page=75.08.

So I was able to add the following as a document-wide setting, which works for me for now:

    include-in-header:
      - text: |
          \setbeamersize{description width=10em}