Dead links in PDF of quarto website.

[birnstiel]

Description

I have a

• quarto book that also gets published as gh-pages website
• and the book is linked on that website
• the website contains other files, e.g. source code that is linked and published alongside

However the link in the rendered pdf does not work since it does not point to the website, but to the relative path.

Is there an elegant way to make this work for all cases (quarto preview, quarto render, quarto publish gh-pages)? It should basically have a relative link in the published and previewed website, but contain the full link to the file on the GitHub server in the published PDF.

here's the _quarto.yml and in index.qmd there is just a link to example.c.

project:
  type: book
  output-dir: _output
  resources:
    - example.c

book:
  title: "Quarto example book"
  downloads: pdf
  author: me
  chapters:
    - index.qmd

format:
  html:
    resources:
      - "/*.c"
  pdf:
    documentclass: scrreprt
    reference-location: section

execute:
  freeze: auto
  fig-dpi: 150

page-navigation: true
reference-location: margin
highlight-style: tango
format-links: true
engine: jupyter

EDIT:

• The book is hosted on GitHub pages - check the linked pdf in the left menu bar. The link in the PDF should go to the website, not a local link.

• The source code of this MWE is in this repository

Here's quarto check output

Quarto 1.6.42
[✓] Checking environment information...
      Quarto cache location: /Users/USERNAME/Library/Caches/quarto
[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.4.0: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.70.0: OK
      Deno version 1.46.3: OK
      Typst version 0.11.0: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.6.42
      Path: /Applications/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: (not installed)
      Chromium: (not installed)

[✓] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: Installation From Path
      Path: /Library/TeX/texbin
      Version: 2021

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.13.1
      Path: /opt/homebrew/opt/[email protected]/bin/python3.13
      Jupyter: (None)

      Jupyter is not available in this Python installation.
      Install with python3 -m pip install jupyter

[✓] Checking R installation...........(None)

      Unable to locate an installed version of R.
      Install R from https://cloud.r-project.org/

[mcanouil]

Unfortunately, what you provided is far from enough for anyone to provide you with any help.

Could you share a small self-contained "working" (reproducible) example to work with, i.e., a Git repository with a project on quarto create project book? The goal is to make it as easy as possible for us to recreate your problem so that we can fix it: please help us help you! Thanks.

Additionally and if not already given, please share the output of quarto check within a code block (i.e., using three backticks ```txt), see https://quarto.org/bug-reports.html#check.

[birnstiel]

Sorry, thought this was enough. I now published the code and the website of this example on GitHub and added the links and quarto check output as well.

[mcanouil]

Accessibility: For better accessibility, please ensure link text is descriptive and meaningful rather than using generic terms such as "here". This helps all users understand the link's destination. See Writing meaningful link text (WCAG).

[mcanouil]

@birnstiel For short, there are no bugs and everything works as expected.
Few things:

• engine: jupyter has no effect in _quarto.yml:
  • engine: should be respected globally at the _quarto.yml level #3157
• You specified a relative link: This is where we point to a [code file](example.c). Why would you expect Quarto to know you want to target a website and how do you expect Quarto to know what would be the host? If you want the link to point to a website and not to something relative to the document, you need to specify the full URL. You can try conditional content or Lua filter if you don't want to specify the full URL.

Note that there are extensions that could help: https://m.canouil.dev/quarto-extensions/

[birnstiel]

Yes this was not a bug report but rather a Q&A if there was a good way to make it work. I.e. something like a prefix for relative urls so that I can use ./ for preview or websites but use the GitHub pages URL in the PDF version.

[mcanouil]

Use a Lua filter:

function Link(link)
  if link.classes:includes("mylink") then
    link.target = "https://m.canouil.dev/" .. link.target
  end
  
  return link
end

---
title: "Quarto Playground"
format:
  html: default
  pdf:
    filters:
      - link.lua
---

This is a playground for Quarto.

This is a link to [Quarto extensions listing](quarto-extensions/){.mylink}