Merge and Knit

[rgaiacs]

I use bookdown and the “Merge and Knit” rendering approach described at https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/new-session.html. My understanding is that Quarto only support the “Knit and Merge” rendering approach. Do you have any plan to support the “Merge and Knit” rendering approach?

[cderv]

For reference, related discussion #431

"Merge and Knit" approach requires a single render for the entire book (one HTML file), then splitting the chapters into several pieces (as bookdown does). It is different from the current assumption of rendering independently each chapters (which bring us some more flexibility and feature that bookdown does not have).

From #431 (comment)

We don't currently support this model unfortunately (it's a non-trivial amount of work so not something we can knock out quickly)

Thanks for the suggestion though.

I think in the short term we really need to document better how to render a book by sharing some data between chapters (which the Knit and Merge approach is really efficient for), and also leveraging Projects Scripts

[cderv]

Related topics #3577

[willgryan]

FWIW, here's how I share data between chapters with minimal work: https://gist.github.com/willgryan/6c8bb8fe1a394917d4779d2ca7ef09e7

I would love for a more Quarto-official way to do this

[cderv]

That is a really clever way to do this !

I don't know how / if we could make it a more official way as it would need to be something that work across engine. But opting in by using your solution is something interesting !

Maybe it could live in quarto R package (github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-r) as this is specific to R users 🤔 ?

Something to think about