Option for content-dir in `_quarto.yml`

[alexkgold]

It's nice when writing a book to have a dedicated sub-dir for the "actual writing", as opposed to quarto scaffolding.

For example:

/
| -- quarto.yml
| 
...
|
| -- chapters/
|   -- chapter1.qmd

Currently, this works fine if your _quarto.yml looks like:

chapters:
  - chapters/chapter1.qmd

This gets unwieldy if you have lots of chapters, or a long dir name.

It would be nice to be able to specify a sub-dir once and then just use the chapter names, e.g.:

content-dir: chapters
chapters:
  - chapter1.qmd

My apologies if this is already possible and I just missed it in the docs.

So far, loving a bookdown -> quarto conversion. Everything feels super ergonomic. Thank you!

[jjallaire]

Glad it's working well for you!

We don't in fact have a way to do what you are asking. Ideally the way this feature would work is that content-dir would actually disappear from URLs (in fact I think it would be pretty disappointing if it didn't). As a result this a more involved change that might appear at first blush (as we do a lot of internal URL and path handling which would need to be cognizant of this behavior).

Nevertheless it's a very good idea and something we should indeed do, just not sure when it will happen.

[winniehell]

from my point of view it would be a better decision to have the directory below the chapters key because that would also allow for multiple subdirectories:

chapters:
- introduction.qmd
- material-and-methods:
  - field-survey.qmd
  - laboratory.qmd
- results:
  - data.qmd
  - models.qmd

which would be equivalent to the flattened:

chapters:
- introduction.qmd
- material-and-methods/field-survey.qmd
- material-and-methods/laboratory.qmd
- results/data.qmd
- results/models.qmd