Rendering a single new article in an old hugo blog site

[harrelfe]

I have an existing hugo/netlify blog site https://fharrell.com. WIthout changing the overall structure or indexes I'd like to start using quarto for rendering. I used the yaml formatting in https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/hugo.html and ran, for the article in my.qmd in the content/post/ directory, the command quarto render my.qmd. This resulted in a valid looking my.md (although the default math rendering during a preview resulted in insertion of blank lines in place in inline equations) but the graphics files were placed in a my_files directory under content/post/ instead of where hugo wants them to be, in ../../static/post/my_files. It's easy to move my_files but the pointers in my.md would be all wrong.

Is there a way to make quarto work in this setting where I want to create new articles as part of my existing hugo structure? Note that in the existing structure hugo puts each article into its own directory and creates an index file under that directory, but what the user deals with is a markdown file (not a directory) under content/post.

I also noticed that a block such as ::: {.column-margin} ... ::: does not render in the margin with the quarto hugo format. One other very minor issue is that hugo yaml tags are not allowed to be numeric. For example I have a tag of 2022 that I had to quote with quarto, whereas ordinary hugo does not require the quotes.

[jjallaire]

Yes, you want to use Hugo page bundles (as described here: https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/hugo.html#creating-a-page). This basically means putting each post in its own directory.

Note that Hugo doesn't have native support for math (it requires one or more special hacks). For example, you may need to write your math within code blocks (as is done in blogdown).

All of those margin features are particular to Quarto HTML so indeed don't work with Hugo.

[harrelfe]

I wonder if the best approach, at least for now, is to use html format and quarto render my.qmd with standalone specification in the yaml header. The only downside is that I don't get a few hugo insertions such as a link to disqus at the bottom of the blog article (hypothes.is will probably be better for this anyway). But I get all the quarto enhancements. If you think of a downside to this approach please let me know. Here's an example: https://fharrell.com/post/powilcoxon

I did find that I had to create a little my.markdown file in the same directory as my.qmd and my.html to provide the summary and tags that hugo needs for the article.

[jjallaire]

That definitely sounds like a reasonable way to split the difference!

[harrelfe]

I'm thrilled with the formatting. And the "extra markdown file" trick, at least so far, seems to keep hugo in shape with regard to article navigation, tags, etc.

[jjallaire]

Okay great, so glad we found a way to make this work.

[kjohnsen]

@harrelfe How exactly do you get Hugo to pick up the Hugo-specific frontmatter? I'm trying to use Quarto to write Hugo posts myself and find I can't use Hugo-specific frontmatter in the Quarto documents (well, unless I edit the resulting index.html after Quarto render, which isn't fun)

[mcanouil]

@kjohnsen See https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/hugo.html.