Academic article (R Markdown) as chapter in Quarto book

[bbartholdy]

Hi all,

This is probably a pretty niche use-case for Quarto, but I'm hoping someone will have an answer.

I'm trying to include an academic article as a book chapter (the book is my PhD dissertation). The article is included as a git submodule, where I would like to use the {{< include >}} shortcode to import the article (avoid copy-paste and make sure any changes I make to the article are changed in the book). The article is in a .Rmd file where the section headings are level-1 headings (required for the article).

The issue:

When I include the .Rmd article file within the .qmd chapter file, i.e. {{< include path/to/paper.Rmd >}}, the headings of the PDF output are off; each section of the article gets its own chapter in the book.
I have used shift-heading-level-by: 1 in the YAML header of the chapter .qmd file, but it only seems to work for the HTML output, not the PDF output. Is there a reason it only works for HTML, and is there a better way to achieve what I'm trying to do?

[cscheid]

The issue, I suspect, is that shift-heading-level-by is a global yaml option (include is a pretty blunt tool: it inlines all the code, and the rest of quarto doesn't know that the options you set are only meant for that document). In order for what you're suggesting to work, I think you'd have to do more clever things.

The Lua filter route is to wrap your include call in a div block with a particular class, then have your lua filter find that block, walk its children, and replace headings manually with headings that are one level lower.

[bbartholdy]

That's what I was afraid of... haven't worked with lua before 😬