Dialogue
The dialog shortcut formats conversation in the Continental em-dash style — each
turn opens with an em-dash instead of quotation marks. Write a plain Markdown bullet list inside the block; each -
becomes one turn:
::: dialog
- Who's there?
- Just the wind.
- At this hour?
:::
A dialog holds only turns, and a turn is the paragraph after its bullet; the dialog warns about what it leaves out.
In PDF each turn renders with an em-dash; in EPUB and HTML it becomes an em-dash-prefixed paragraph. The block gets breathing room above and below, and inner lines aren't first-line-indented.
Wrapped turns
By default a turn that wraps onto more lines flows back to the body margin (tight). Set style="hanging" to indent the
continuation under the speech instead, which makes turn boundaries pop when turns are long:
::: {.dialog style="hanging"}
- Hello? She paused, listening for any sound at all from the hallway, some
footstep or shifting weight, anything to confirm she had heard correctly.
- It's me.
:::
style—hangingadds a hanging indent on wrapped lines; omit it (or usedefault) for the tight, flush-left wrap.
Prose dialogue
This shortcut is only for the dash-led convention. Conventional quotation-mark dialogue needs no special markup — write it as ordinary prose and it typesets normally.