2  Positions

position decides where the control is injected. This chapter uses title, so the control sits directly below the chapter heading above — the first thing you see when you arrive on the page.

Every other chapter of this book uses a different value, so you can compare them by navigating rather than by reading a table.

chapter	position
Overview	interactive sidebar / margin-sidebar example
Positions (this one)	title
Scopes	navbar
BibTeX and styles	floating
The shortcode	inline
Turning it off	none

2.1 Setting it

At project level, in _quarto.yml:

extensions:
  cite-this:
    position: margin-sidebar

Or per page, in the front matter — which is exactly what this chapter does:

---
title: "Positions"
extensions:
  cite-this:
    position: floating
    corner: bottom-right
---

2.2 The values

2.2.1 title

Directly below the page or chapter title. Nothing to configure, nothing to depend on: every Quarto page has a title block, so this position always has a target.

2.2.2 sidebar and margin-sidebar

sidebar places the control in Quarto’s left chapter-navigation sidebar. margin-sidebar places it in the right page table-of-contents actions, next to “Edit this page” and “Report an issue”. These names deliberately match Quarto’s #quarto-sidebar and #quarto-margin-sidebar elements.

The switch on the Overview moves one live widget between both sidebars only to make the difference easy to see. Normal sites choose one value in YAML; there is no reader-facing switch.

2.2.3 navbar

An icon in the navigation bar. Always reachable and unobtrusive, but a book rendered with a sidebar and no navbar has nowhere to put it.

2.2.4 floating

A pill fixed to the corner named by corner, which accepts bottom-right (default), bottom-left, top-right and top-left. This is the default position because it works consistently on desktop and mobile, at the cost of floating over the content.

2.2.5 inline and none

inline injects nothing automatically — only the {{< cite-this >}} shortcode renders, wherever you place it. none disables the extension’s output on that page entirely.

2.3 When the target is missing

A book without chapter navigation has no left sidebar, and a page without a table of contents has no right sidebar. A site without a navbar has no navigation bar. When the configured position has no target in the rendered page, the control falls back to floating and logs a warning to the browser console — it never disappears silently.

2.4 The collapsed state

The control is collapsed to a single icon by default and expands to reveal the label and the remaining actions. It expands on three triggers, not one:

• hover, for mouse users
• keyboard focus, so tabbing into the control opens it
• tap, on devices where hover does not exist at all

Expanding on hover alone would make the control unreachable by keyboard and unusable on phones. The inline block never collapses: placed in the body of your text it is content, not a trigger.