How to get consistent epub link colors / styling?

[cod3licious]

Description

I noticed that the hyperlink styling in epubs is very inconsistent across epub viewers; especially in the macOS and iOS Books app the links are often indistinguishable from regular text.
Here's a simple example document:

---
title: "Colored Links Example"
format:
  epub:
    default
---

Some text and a [normal link](https://quarto.org/)

Some more text and a [*italic link*](https://quarto.org/)

When rendered with quarto 1.8.24 the resulting epub looks fine in Calibre's epub viewer:

But the links look the same as regular text in the macOS Books app (normally, i.e., in other books, they would be in color, similar to the italics link in the iOS app):

In the iOS Books app, the link that has additional formatting applied is correctly rendered in color, but the other link not:

I also noticed that cross-references (like footnotes and chapter references) are also not in color, but this is less dramatic.

What can I do so that the links can be distinguished from regular text across all apps?

[mcanouil]

Quarto CLI does not control how third party preview the content.

As you are saying the exact same content display differently depending of the third party tool used, the issue is very likely on them.

[mcanouil]

Then could you extract the relevant code from an epub that "works"?

[cod3licious]

How do I do that?

Also, after some digging my current hypothesis is that the underlying issue might be with pandoc. Is Quarto using pandoc's default CSS file when rendering epubs? Seems like there the link color is explicitly set to black and I get the same behavior when creating an epub with pandoc directly that I get with Quarto.

[cod3licious]

Ok, I filed an issue with pandoc, maybe they can remove this from the default CSS and then eventually this fix should be propagated into Quarto.

In the meantime, can I pass custom CSS to Quarto to overwrite the formatting only for links while keeping the rest at their default values?

[cod3licious]

Wow, the pandoc maintainer is fast and removed the problematic lines from the default CSS, so I guess now it's just a matter of waiting until Quarto updates its internal pandoc version to the next release.

[mcanouil]

Thanks for filling the issue upstream.

You should be able to override any CSS in your Quarto document YAML header as you would for any HTML based document.

As the Quarto team usually updates dependencies once per release, the fix will likely be included in either 1.9 or 1.10.