How to convert a html page back to qmd?

[dgdi]

Description

Hello,

I recently discovered a few online books published via Quarto that I'm keen on using for teaching. One particular book, Python for Data Analysis, offers the code notebooks on GitHub, but not the original qmd.
Creating slides can be quite time-consuming, so I'm searching for a tool that could assist in the conversion of the html pages back into a qmd format, similar to the original input. This would speed up significantly the slide preparation.
Does anyone have suggestions or solutions for this?

[cscheid]

offers the code notebooks on GitHub, but not the original qmd.

Quarto can render from .ipynb files directly; those are possibly the actual source of the book.

[dgdi]

Hi @cscheid, thanks for the quick reply!
Unfortunately the available notebooks only store the code cells (of the original qmd, I believe), without the markdown cells that make up the most part of the content.

[mcanouil]

Note that your question is kind of ethically speaking not a great one.
If the authors do not want to share the source, it is for a reason, providing a way to go against that feels not right.
You should reach out to the authors.

Also, when using others' work, please do watch for license and deal with them appropriately.

[cscheid]

Unfortunately the available notebooks only store the code cells (of the original qmd, I believe), without the markdown cells that make up the most part of the content.

I apologize, I should have checked the notebook files. In that case, I think @mcanouil's advice is appropriate here; the author probably doesn't mean for you to use that content, and the LICENSE file in the repository does not include the textual content of the book.

[dgdi]

Hi @mcanouil, thanks for your reply. I see your point and I have reached out to the author who told me the publisher would not allow the release of the original notebooks.

That said, I thought of your point before starting the discussion but I am still not convinced by it.

As a teacher who will use the book in the course, I am now expanding and rewriting (some parts of) the book content in a slide format for classroom presentation. This is standard in academia and I do not think this raises any legal/ethical issues.
Now what I am searching for is a tool to automate and speed up this process, so that I do not have to start from scratch.
Why should that be a problem? because an intermediate output ends up being close to the original? this does not sound right to me but, clearly, I might be wrong.

@mcanouil I am happy to hear your view (and change my mind/close this discussion, if needed) now that I have provided a bit more context.

[cscheid]

Without having to resolve the ethical concerns of your current situation, the answer to your question is that quarto doesn't have a mechanism for converting from the target format to the source format.

[dgdi]

@cscheid sorry for the previous messages mixing up, I forgot to refresh before replying. Many thanks for the info, and thanks for your work, Quarto is an impressive tool! even despite the lack of this "essential" feature :- )

[ericjmorey]

For others, like myself, who have legitimate use for this feature such as converting a document licensed under a permissive license such as the Creative Commons licenses that allow for derivatives or uses that are covered under the fair use protections or even for converting your own original documents, look into using Pandoc directly.

[carsen-stringer]

Asking here as I think it's a similar question. Can you put html files into your quarto project and have them as links from quarto pages (ideally with the github-pages hosting approach)? I have html files that I've written myself that I didn't want to have to convert, but I can if necessary. Apologies if this is answered else, thanks for the great tool!

[mcanouil]

It's actually a different question, could you open a new discussion? Thank you.