How to include non-Quarto-generated formats in "Other formats"?

[allefeld]

Description

I'm using a Quarto website project to document a software library, including working code examples as qmd files, and I would like to provide on the qmd-derived pages a link to download the code as a script.

Quarto offers the possibility to add ipynb to formats:, which then creates an "Other formats" section below the table of contents, which includes a "Juypter" link. However, because the targeted community does not normally use Jupyter notebooks, offering to download an ipynb file would not be very useful for them. Instead, I would use a pre-render script to extract the code from the qmd file and write it to a regular script file of the language – but I don't see a way to link to such a script file under "Other formats".

I thought about writing a custom format, but those need to be based on a format built into Quarto, and none of them seem to be appropriate for the purpose. Script files are not a special case of documents, presentations, markdown files, wiki files, or any of the other formats.

I could of course simply link to the script file from the document text, but I'd prefer a more visible position like in the right margin.

I'd appreciate tips how to achieve something like this with the current Quarto functionality.

Otherwise I propose it as a new feature. That could either be options to customize "Other formats", or a new script output format. Such a script format would have to provide options to set the comment character (to include Markdown as comments) as well as the file extension.

[mcanouil]

Why not use code tools?

https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/html-code.html#code-tools

See:

• Feature request: View page source easily #3056

[allefeld]

I was first confused by your comment because the code tools are advertised as showing the qmd source, not a script file. But then I figured out that using source: its possible to link to an arbitrary URL, including a script file copied to the output as a resource. So you're right, that is a possibility, thanks!

What I dislike about that is that by default the URL seems to be loaded as a replacement for the current page, not as a download. I would therefore downgrade my feature request to this: Please add a boolean download: option to code-tools, which if true adds the attribute download to the generated a element.

In the meantime I discovered that it is possible to put arbitrary material in the margin via margin-header and margin-footer, and though this is semantically somewhat wrong, it does the trick for me.

[mcanouil]

See:

• Make code-tools in or under "Other formats" #7436