It would be useful to support the concept of a "second page" (after title) for book projects.

[fuhrmanator]

For the editing standards of my book project, a second page with ISBN, etc. (which seems pretty standard) is required. For the time being, I can't find a way to do this. The index.qmd is after the Tables of contents, etc. in a PDF file, so I can't put it there.

My solution was to create the second page in LaTeX and HTML, and use include-before-body: for the PDF and HTML format of the book. I used pandoc to help me create these files from a common markdown, but it seems like I'm doing what Quarto could be doing.

If you need more details, I can provide a MWE.

[fuhrmanator]

My solution was to create the second page in LaTeX and HTML, and use include-before-body: for the PDF and HTML format of the book. I used pandoc to help me create these files from a common markdown, but it seems like I'm doing what Quarto could be doing.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work for HTML because this "second page" include appears on ALL pages of the HTML (it's a web site).

It looks like I'm forced to put it in the index.qmd file, which has the unfortunate consequence that the (chapter) heading has to appear at the start of the "second" page.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

[mcanouil]

If you have a kind of working repository for this, I can take a look and see if I can come up with an idea.

[mcanouil]

Did you try to use the template instead of partials which are only part of the template partial, i.e. template.tex? See https://quarto.org/docs/journals/templates.html#latex-partials.
I believe you could define your own template based on Pandoc/Quarto template to make your second title page work as expected, at least for PDF.

[fuhrmanator]

Yes, I was able to get something working with PDF (partials or includes) as I stated above. The problem was with the HTML - the template approach won't work since every chapter is essentially a web "page" that will include the second page. I realized that if I want it to work, it has to be in the index.html, at least with the current Quarto design.

My compromise so far is to remove the the tables of contents/figures/tables from the PDF (because they appear between the cover page and the content on index.qmd) and hack the index.qmd (edit). You can see the solution at https://github.com/fuhrmanator/log210-ndc-quarto/blob/b38188f8fda0bcb44e26b6a820d1eeaf950af41a/index.qmd#L1-L7 which includes https://github.com/fuhrmanator/log210-ndc-quarto/blob/main/_deuxieme_page.qmd (the second page is included at the top of index.qmd).

It's not perfect, but it's acceptable. First, LaTeX will always place a # or ## heading at the top of the page, regardless of the order of index.qmd. For example, if I try to just define the second page with no # at the top, the # Preface definition that comes after will appear at the top. I suppose this is just because the scrbook template always needs a header at the top. So, my hack was to used a blank #. To keep it from taking up 1/5 of the vertical space (the second page is supposed to fit on one printed page), I use the \vspace hack to move up into the blank header. This looks great in PDF, but has the downside of confusing the HTML version, making an index.html heading in the navigation of the HTML page:

I even had to play around with using extra spaces after the # so that I didn't get {.unnumbered .unlisted} as a navigation entry on the left in HTML!

For now, I can live with this.

Interestingly, this solution makes a different result in the PDF for the index:

It's not totally correct either, since technically there's a blank # with several ## headings under it (Peface, etc.). But again, I can live with it. The constraint for the second page was not something I considered early enough.

LaTeX has a \frontmatter and \mainmatter (which I've never used) and maybe Quarto could exploit that for the PDF solution. It would be nice if the index.qmd had a mechanism to specify the second page (akin to \frontmatter), and Quarto made it work for the PDF/EPUB/HTML/etc. output.

[fuhrmanator]

I also should point out that my "hack" breaks the right-side navigation of the HTML's index.html page (it doesn't appear).

[fuhrmanator]

I found that scrbook has some hooks for the second page (called titleback*). Maybe there are some design ideas for a Quarto solution.

An example is at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/100528/17868 - this solution requires that \maketitle be delayed after defining the second page with scrbook's titleback hooks in the \frontmatter

\frontmatter and \maketitle are embedded in the partials/templates of Quarto. It doesn't look feasible/easy to pull off the scrbook (Koma script) features with the current design, at least not from the index.qmd (so that the HTML also gets the second page correctly).