Best approach to put togother a presentation from multiple files (pre-render? shortcode?)

[RudolfVonKrugstein]

Description

Hi,

I have the following file structure:

chapters/
  chapter1/
    index.qmd
    01_topic.qmd
    ...
  chapter2/
    ...

Now I would like to put together a presentation (revealjs) from this. Doing it manually would look like this:

---
... frontmatter ...
---

{{<include chapters/chapter1/index.qmd>}}

{{<include chapter/chapter1/01_topic.qmd>}}

...

(or similar, the final structure might be subject to some more fiddeling).

But I dont want to do it manually (having to maintain the central slides.qmd file and also risking errors in tha manual putting together), I want to automate this.

Two approaches I thought of:

1. A shortcode. That would work, but as I undestand it I cannot put a shortcode early enough in the rendering pipeline, so that other internal quarto shortcodes still work. For exapmle, if I would use the include shortcode in one of the files, that would not work because the include shortcode is not run anymore after my shortcode did run.
2. A pre-render script. I am struggling here with the documentation. A pre-render script cannot modify the source files, correct?

Are my assumptions correct? Maybe there is a way around this and one of these approaches acually would work?

Or are there other good ways of doing this?

Thank you!

[mcanouil]

Write a pre-render script in whatever languages (lua, bash, typsescript, R, python) or Lua filters/shortcodes.

The native "include" shortcode runs before anything and is not in Lua.
You can choose at each phase your filters run: https://quarto.org/docs/advanced/quarto-ast.html#targeting-of-ast-processing-phases

A pre-render script cannot modify the source files, correct?

Yes it can, but you might need to have at least a "placeholder" file.

Note that, as documented, the include shortcode will copy/paste everything from your files, including YAML header which might overwrite each other (last wins).

You can look at other extensions to get inspired (in respect to the licenses): https://m.canouil.dev/quarto-extensions/

For examples, the following two extensions are close to the native include shortcode:

• https://github.com/mcanouil/quarto-external
• https://github.com/gadenbuie/quarto-partials