book chapters as separate revealjs presentations

[dhicks]

I'm a university professor. For one of my classes, I like to present my lecture notes as both a presentation (eg, slidy or revealjs, for use in class) and a unified website (eg, gitbook, for students to consult out of class). With Rmarkdown, I could do this by having two different recipes in a Makefile: one that uses bookdown::render_book() to create the single gitbook, and another that uses rmarkdown::render() to create a presentation for each separate chapter Rmd file.

I'm playing around with Quarto, trying to figure out how I might be able to do this. Something like quarto render chfile --to revealjs in a book project generates a warning: WARNING: The revealjs format is not supported by book projects. (This should probably be an error, because Quarto doesn't go on to executive any code chunks or produce any output files.) Including revealjs as a format in _quarto.yml does the same thing. I tried setting up a separate metadata file, _slides.yml, but quarto render doesn't seem to have any flags to select which metadata file should be used.

So currently the best option seems to be to stick with rmarkdown::render() for the slides?

[jjallaire]

This is indeed an unfortunate constraint (and the warning should be an error!). I'd suggest for now just wrapping the rendering of the slides with code that either temporarily renames the _quarto.yml file OR stages the presentations in another directory.

[tomkom]

I have a very similar problem. I am unsure how to modify the overall yml to have a "parallel" one for the slides. It appears there is no project type for revealjs, and any reveal slides are therefore purely defined within the single qmd file. Is there a way to have a "project" for many slides/chapters? I thought about including the header of all the slides in a central yml, and including/excluding a corresponding qmd as in render, but cannot figure out how to do this.

I am asking this as I have the same need as above, trying to keep book chapters and corresponding slides based on the same codebase to a large extent.

[mcanouil]

Small example (source: https://github.com/mcanouil/quarto-issues/tree/main/quarto-cli-1433):

1. quarto create-project . --type book

2. default yaml for book: _quarto.yml

   See the code.

   project:
     type: book
     output-dir: _book
   
   book:
     title: "test"
     author: "Jane Doe"
     date: "25/07/2022"
     chapters:
       - index.qmd
       - intro.qmd
       - summary.qmd
       - references.qmd
   
   bibliography: references.bib
   
   format:
     html:
       theme: cosmo

4. yaml for slides: _quarto_revealjs.yml

   See the code.

   project:
     output-dir: _slides
     render:
       - index.qmd
       - intro.qmd
       - summary.qmd
       - references.qmd
   
   title: "test"
   author: "Jane Doe"
   date: "25/07/2022"
   bibliography: references.bib
   
   format: revealjs

5. A function to render everything in both formats (below are really simple functions)

   • In R:

     See the code.

     render_book_slides <- function(...) {
       quarto::quarto_render(..., as_job = FALSE)
       file.rename("_quarto.yml", "_quarto_book.yml")
       file.rename("_quarto_revealjs.yml", "_quarto.yml")
       on.exit(file.rename("_quarto.yml", "_quarto_revealjs.yml"))
       on.exit(file.rename("_quarto_book.yml", "_quarto.yml"), add = TRUE)
       quarto::quarto_render(..., as_job = FALSE)
     }

   • In bash:

     See the code.

     function render_book_slides() {
       quarto render .
       mv _quarto.yml _quarto_book.yml
       mv _quarto_revealjs.yml _quarto.yml
       quarto render .
       mv _quarto.yml _quarto_revealjs.yml
       mv _quarto_book.yml _quarto.yml
       return 0
     }

6. Render using any of the functions

   • In R: render_book_slides() (or execute _build.r from the command line)

     See the output.

     render_book_slides()
     #> [1/4] index.qmd
     #> [2/4] intro.qmd
     #> [3/4] summary.qmd
     #> [4/4] references.qmd
     #> 
     #> Output created: _book/index.html
     #> 
     #> [1/4] index.qmd
     #> [2/4] intro.qmd
     #> [3/4] summary.qmd
     #> [4/4] references.qmd
     #> 
     #> Output created: _slides/index.html

   • In bash: render_book_slides (or execute _build.sh from the command line)

     See the output.

     render_book_slides
     #> [1/4] index.qmd
     #> [2/4] intro.qmd
     #> [3/4] summary.qmd
     #> [4/4] references.qmd
     #> 
     #> Output created: _book/index.html
     #> 
     #> renamed '_quarto.yml' -> '_quarto_book.yml'
     #> renamed '_quarto_revealjs.yml' -> '_quarto.yml'
     #> [1/4] index.qmd
     #> [2/4] intro.qmd
     #> [3/4] summary.qmd
     #> [4/4] references.qmd
     #> 
     #> Output created: _slides/index.html
     #> 
     #> renamed '_quarto.yml' -> '_quarto_revealjs.yml'
     #> renamed '_quarto_book.yml' -> '_quarto.yml'

7. Project directory tree with your slides in _slides and your book in _book.

   See the directory tree.

   .
   ├── _book
   │   ├── index.html
   │   ├── intro.html
   │   ├── references.html
   │   ├── search.json
   │   ├── site_libs
   │   └── summary.html
   ├── _quarto.yml
   ├── _quarto_revealjs.yml
   ├── _slides
   │   ├── index.html
   │   ├── index_files
   │   ├── intro.html
   │   ├── intro_files
   │   ├── references.html
   │   ├── references_files
   │   ├── summary.html
   │   └── summary_files
   ├── cover.png
   ├── index.qmd
   ├── intro.qmd
   ├── references.bib
   ├── references.qmd
   └── summary.qmd
   

Note: variables could be used to define shared variables between the two yaml and calling out those variables using shortcodes (see https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/variables.html).

[tomkom]

This works very nicely, thank you! I have a follow up question ( which probably merits it's own question then): can we tag content in the "book" to not be included in the slides ( and vice versa?). I suspect some :::{.keep_inbook} or similar magic ( I am not entirely across how this gets fed to the CSS and post-processing at render would work. Simply, in a book there is way more text, but often you want to keep a few figures, or bullet points for the slides.

Anyway, the above works perfectly, thanks!

[mcanouil]

I can only think of some JavaScript hiding contents based on classes/attributes, but it's still included.

[jcolomb]

it seems you can use {visibility="hidden"} in the header , it shows in the book, but not in the slide deck.

Not sure if there is a vice Versa way to do it (show only on slides). Maybe using {when-profile="advanced"} could work ? https://quarto.org/docs/projects/profiles.html#profile-content

[jcolomb]

PS: you can also add some more metadata.
PS: no need of an index.qmd for slides, needed for the book though.

In my case, reveals options is not working for all slides (probably something to do with paragraph with only headers of level 1).

project:
  output-dir: _slides
  render:
    - _episodes/01-introduction.md
    - _episodes/02-motivation.md
    
title: "test-slides"
author: "jc"


format:
  revealjs:
    smaller: true
    scrollable: true
    slide-level: 3

[jcolomb]

slightly related, is there a way to then combine different chapters into a single slide deck ?

[mcanouil]

It would probably have been better to open a new discussion and linked it by typing #1433 to auto-link to this discussion.

I think, there is only one way to do what you want, which is the use of {{< include chapter.qmd >}} in your Quarto document using the format: revealjs.