How to put the project content in subfolder?

[josedusol]

Quarto, just like bookdown, forces me to have a non empty index.qmd file in the root folder, even if i'm only interested in pdf output. I can't just remove index.qmd from the chapters attribute in yaml file because i get

ERROR: Book contents must include a home page (e.g. index.md)

I would like to put all my book content in a subfolder. Is this possible?

[cscheid]

It's not currently possible.

[josedusol]

Thanks for the info.

But, is there any workaround?. For example, in bookdown one can put an empty index.Rmd file in project root, and exclude it from loaded Rmd files in configuration file. Then, we can have e.g. subfolder/introduction.Rmd as main file, where we declare first section as:

# Introduction {#index}

This trick es enough for bookdown, the index file for html output is created from subfolder/introduction.Rmd. And it is not used for other output formats.

Unfortunately, this does not work in Quarto, maybe because {#label} doesn't set the file name to label as in bookdown, but i'm not sure.

[josedusol]

Or there is some way to change the name of index.qmd?

[cscheid]

I'm not aware of a workaround. Is there a specific reason you don't want to have an index.qmd file?

[josedusol]

Personally, i would like to name my project files with meaningful names representing the structure of my book. For example: preface.qmd, introduction.qmd, whatever.qmd, etc. But for some reason something named index.qmd needs to be there. So, people typically uses index.qmd to put the preface or introduction. This is not big deal, but is ugly (ok, i imagine this have priority 0). The same goes for bookdown.

I found quarto useful because it allows me to abstract away from concrete formats (HTML, PDF, ETC), is the tool responsibility to generate the concrete formats. The obligation to have something with name index is HTML specific. I hope the tool could just create this file for the HTML output behind the scenes.

That said, i'm completely ignorant of the inner workings, surely there are reasons i don't know.

Anyway, thanks for the chat Carlos. Keep up the good work and happy new year!.

[cscheid]

The obligation to have something with name index is HTML specific.

It also happens to bookdown and quarto specific (in other words, we chose this). We can argue about aesthetics, but index is a commonly-accepted file name for "default", so we use it.