How do I render additional formats with quarto book?

[kylebutts]

Description

I have a quarto book with a folder structure where I have one .qmd file per folder, e.g.:

logbook
└── clean
    ├── census_data
    │   └── index.qmd
    └── shapefiles
        └── index.qmd

I want to render the book and a readme.md file for viewing on the github repository. These files take a while to run, so I would like if both formats could be rendered together.

Ideas:

1. When rendering a book, is it possible to have other output formats outputted for each .qmd file as specified in the format argument?
2. Is it possible to have a markdown format for a book project? (This would be nice and could follow the folder structure of parts?)

[mcanouil]

1. You mean like described in https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/html-multi-format.html?
2. If you try, you'll see WARNING: The markdown format is not supported by book projects because what is a markdown book exactly? A very very long plain text file?

[kylebutts]

That doesn't (seem to) work with the Quarto Book. Am I missing how to do that?

[mcanouil]

No it's for website or regular HTML.

[mcanouil]

But you can add download links to Books format: https://quarto.org/docs/books/book-output.html#sidebar-tools

[kylebutts]

I don't know the internals to quarto, so maybe something about the book format makes this not possible, but that page you link to suggests that this should be possible?

HTML books are at their core Quarto Websites with some special navigational behavior built in. This means that all of the features described for enhancing websites are also available for books, including:

This is really helpful though; I suppose I could just use the sidebar option with a website to do this, thanks @mcanouil

[mcanouil]

Books are really books.
To me, if parts/chapters are completely independent, then maybe website project type is better suited.
In the end, it's up to you to find what serves best your needs.

[cscheid]

When rendering a book, is it possible to have other output formats outputted for each .qmd file as specified in the format argument?

That's not possible. It's unlikely to be possible in the near-future as well, because the single-file output is a quite different code path, and the intermediate file that's passed to knitr in book format will in general be different for books and individual files. What knitr produces is also different depending on the format: consider image formats supported in PDF vs HTML (or the fact that some packages emit interactive widgets in HTML vs static images in PDF books).

From what I understand, you want to do this to accelerate your rendering ("These files take a while to run"); but because different render calls involve multiple calls to knitr, I don't think what you're suggesting is possible in how quarto runs.

If you want to reuse computations, currently Quarto itself is not exactly well-suited for it. We might change that in the future, but that's unfortunately the present reality. If you're willing to change your workflow, you might consider rendering intermediate results to Jupyter notebooks, and then embedding their contents: https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/notebook-embed.html

[mcanouil]

For R code, the targets R package could help a lot with heavy computational documents.