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

[harrelfe]

I worked with Claude to develop an R script and a yaml language for specification of my online book chapters and sections or sections to omit. The script is for Quarto books, not presentations, but is probably adaptable. The source is the permanent html (both web sites and local files) so that the finished consolidated html for the course references the original section numbers, and puts the source book names in the right margin for whatever page you view. The output of all this is at https://hbiostat.org/course/rms . You can also insert images and html iframes into the output. At the end of the rms course is a somewhat interactive presentation created with marp, inside an iframe.

When specifying sections to include you can refer to them either by the rendered Quarto section number or by the symbolic tag you specified for the section in your Quarto source section title.

For more information see https://github.com/harrelfe/rscripts/blob/master/stitch_course.md . In that same Github repo you'll see the stitch_course R script. It has to be edited for your sources.

I zoom to 200% and the html generated by Quarto automatically makes presentation-format pages when I teach on Zoom.

Technical detail: If you have math in your Quarto documents, Safari doesn't keep the right sizes of math vs regular text when you zoom to 200%. Chrome-based browsers do. I had great luck with Brave.