How to disable numbering of title page?

[roaldarbol]

Description

I am building a book (a PhD thesis) with Quarto, and only the sections with main content should be numbered. Whilst I can avoid numbering by using {.unnumbered} for any header blocks, I haven't been able to find a way to do this for index.md, my title page. Does anyone know a way of managed this?

[cderv]

Can you share your book repo for example ?

Or an example of what exactly you tried ? What is inside your index.md ?

Having example allows us to be sure we are considering the right things and not misunderstanding anything.

Thank you !

[roaldarbol]

Absolutely! I found out the underlying reason was that roles: null in author in _quarto.yml throws an error (using anything else in roles works`) - and that was the error I ended up having to circumvent.

So if you create a new book project, and instead use this _quarto.yml it'll break:

project:
  type: book

book:
  title: "Awesome title"
  date: "12/20/2024"
  author:
    - name: Some name
      roles: null
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - part: Introduction
      chapters:
        - intro.qmd
        - summary.qmd

bibliography: references.bib

format:
  html:
    theme: cosmo

editor: visual

UNLESS you add the following YAML header to index.qmd:

---
title: "Awesome title"
date: "12/20/2024"
author:
  - name: Some name
---

That somehow escapes the error - so what I had working was a happy coincidence that only surfaced when I tried to remove the YAML content from index.qmd.

[mcanouil]

FYI, in YAML null is ~ (https://yaml.org/type/null.html).
null has been added in recent YAML specification: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/#10211-null

[cderv]

Thanks @mcanouil - I do believe we support null. Just that our Lua filter handling does not handle roles being null and our YAML validation does not prevent it either.

Thanks @roaldarbol I'll open an issue for this

[cderv]

Tracked at #11057

[roaldarbol]

Follow-up question: Is it possible to have index.qmd not show up in the ToC (of a book)? The closest I've found is Danielle Navarro's hack-around, index.qmd here, rendered site here, which basically just uses   (whitespace) as the title whilst unlisting and unnumbering.

[mcanouil]

Do you want to hide it in HTML only?

[roaldarbol]

Preferably both HTML and PDF I think. Currently I just have a pretty much empty page, just because it needs to be there. :-)

[mcanouil]

An uglier "hack" for HTML: # [Preface]{style="display: none;"} {.unnumbered .unlisted}

Doing: # Preface {.unnumbered .unlisted style="display: none;"} would make the whole section not appear at all.

edit: or a bit better:

---
include-in-header:
  - text: |
      <style>
      h1.unlisted {
        display: none;
      }
      </style>
---

# Preface {.unnumbered .unlisted}

This is a Quarto book.

To learn more about Quarto books visit <https://quarto.org/docs/books>.

[mcanouil]

Note the example is quarto create project book

[roaldarbol]

Haha, these are great hacks! I'll just use them an happily forget about it. 😅

[mcanouil]

A LUA filter might also work but not entirely sure in the context of books.