Github pages and unnumbered crossrefs

[lauren-obrien]

Just want to run something past the team - I've been adapting an existing print book to Quarto (using R), with the goal of making it easier to interact with but very similar in layout and appearance to the source material. Results are here -https://lauren-obrien.github.io/nzsc_v3/

The book has a) no chapter numbering and b) a huge amount of between-chapter cross references that require alt-text. In order to get these to render properly on Github pages, I've found myself using the following hack:

1. cross reference like (destination text)[chapter-x.qmd#sec-tag)
2. Set

project:
  type: book
  output-dir: docs

format:
  html:
    number-sections: false

3. Render, then run the following to find-and-replace over the /docs folder before pushing the built book out:

targets <- list.files('docs', pattern = '\\.html', full.names = TRUE)

lapply(targets, function(i) {
  x  <- readLines(i)
  out  <- gsub(pattern = "qmd#", replace = "html#", x = x)
  writeLines(out, con = i)
})

I'm aware that this is a filthy hack, but the results look good. However, because it is a filthy hack, I'm not sure how stable it is long term, or under varying circumstances, e.g. my book has very little executable code in it, no extensions etc.

Should I be doing something else?