Hugo generated .Summary lacks manual cut-off in .Rmd

[ProQuestionAsker]

While the Hugo-generated .Summary leaves much to be desired in terms of customization, it can be slightly modified in .md documents by adding a <!--more--> tag below content you wish to be included. This tag doesn't seem to work on blogdown-generated .Rmd files, causing the default summary to be the first 70 words of the post (which often includes the table of contents and other materials that aren't appropriate for a summary).

This may be more of a Hugo issue than a blogdown one but it seemed appropriate to at least mention here.

[tovare]

It looks like Blogdown knits to html, although the partials are properly processed features like summary and table of contents are not available. The <!--more-> processing command is included as a regular html comment.

I modified my template to use description if available, because the first 70-words was messy.

      {{ if .Description }}
        {{ .Description }}
      {{ else }}
        {{ .Summary | plainify | safeHTML }}
      {{ end }}
    {{ if .Truncated }}

[ProQuestionAsker]

@tovare Brilliant!! I had tried manually adding a .Summary field but hadn't thought to add a .Description!

Works like a charm. Thank you!

[yihui]

Right. It is up to the specific Hugo theme whether/how you can customize the summary. Some themes support the summary field in YAML, such as https://github.com/gcushen/hugo-academic and https://github.com/digitalcraftsman/hugo-icarus-theme You can write something like

---
title: "My Post"
summary: "A custom summary of my post."
---

[trefoil-ml]

@ProQuestionAsker Hi Amber, I am using the same theme you are using for your website/blog. Could you please tell me where to modify the template as @tovare suggested?

[lyons7]

@trefoil-ml You ever figure out where to modify the template?

[ProQuestionAsker]

Sorry for the delay here @trefoil-ml and @lyons7

I had to add the description code as suggested by @tovare to both the "Portfolio" partial file and the "list" partial file. You'll find the updated versions in the repo for my site:

Portfolio: https://github.com/ProQuestionAsker/ProQuestionAsker.github.io/blob/07467d475eed5496138d32cd3bc65cdab84b6c8d/themes/hugo-creative-portfolio-theme/layouts/partials/portfolio.html#L35

List: https://github.com/ProQuestionAsker/ProQuestionAsker.github.io/blob/07467d475eed5496138d32cd3bc65cdab84b6c8d/themes/hugo-creative-portfolio-theme/layouts/_default/list.html#L54

Then you just add a description feature to your YAML header. So the header for my blog post looks like this:

---
date: "2016-12-19"
title: "Making a Website Using Blogdown, Hugo, and GitHub pages."
type: "post"
showonlyimage: true
draft: false
weight: 0
author: "Amber Thomas"
image: "blog/img/SiteTutorial.jpg"
description: "Wonder how I set up this website using just GitHub pages, Hugo, and RStudio package blogdown? This tutorial walks you through every step." 
---

Hope that helps!

[lyons7]

Thank you so much @ProQuestionAsker! Works like a charm 🥇

[andrie]

The equivalent solution for the tranquilpeak theme is to modify the file themes\hugo-tranquilpeak-theme\layouts\_default\summary.html as follows:

Replace line 44:

{{ printf "%s" .Summary | markdownify }}

with:

{{if .Description }}
  {{ printf "%s" .Description }}
{{ else }}
  {{ printf "%s" .Summary | markdownify }}
{{ end }}

[jhchou]

@andrie -- thank you very much for the simple replacement solution for tranquilpeak to allow use of a description field in the YAML.

In case anyone finds this solution, for the current version 0.4.3-BETA, the replacement in themes\hugo-tranquilpeak-theme\layouts\_default\summary.html has been simplified a bit:

Replace line 43:

{{ .Summary }}

with:

      {{if .Description }}
        {{ .Description }}
      {{ else }}
        {{ .Summary }}
      {{ end }}

Edited to add:

Per @SteveRxD, the following change (using the YAML parameter 'summary' instead of 'description', and I think applying markdown formatting processing) from here might be a better replacement consistent with future versions of tranquilpeak:

{{ if .Params.Summary }} {{ .Params.Summary | markdownify }} {{ else }} {{ .Summary }} {{ end }}

[cmcouto-silva]

You guys are awesome! I could do the same proposed by @tovare, as explained by @ProQuestionAsker, in both files 'layouts/partials/recent_posts.html' and '/layouts/_default/list.html' for hugo-universal-theme. It works like a charm, thanks!!

[mkhezr]

I want to request to reopen this issue because although the workarounds above allow for customizing the summary text, they still leave the following issue unresolved.

One of the things that hugo does with the <!--more--> summary divider is that it keeps the html before the divider intact. This means that the summary that is generated is not just text but could include other elements such as figure. Whereas when the divider is not used, first all html is striped and then the 70 word summary is generated. (See Hugo's documentation)

I am using the Jane theme and I wish the summaries to include header photos which means that we need to signal hugo with a <!--more--> tag to preserve the html. maybe a helper function similar to blogdown::shortcode will do the work.

@yihui I would be happy to provide examples and more details.

[jozefhajnala]

@ProQuestionAsker, @yihui another approach I use with success that fullfills @mkhezr 's requirement to preserve the html is using replaceRE.

My context is I use this to generate summaries for posts on index, where each post consists of a summary and then a content, divided by the standard <!--more-->. This means for me that to produce a summary, I replace everything after that with empty string:

<p class = "summary">
  {{ replaceRE "(?s)(<!--more-->.*)" "" .Content  | safeHTML }}
</p>

This uses regular expressions to

• replace everything in .Content after <!--more--> with an empty string ""
• note the (?s) flag that lets . match \n (newline)

You could of course use any other string for the splitting, or any other pattern that better suits your needs as regular expressions are a very flexible tool.

References:

• https://gohugo.io/functions/replacere/
• https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/Syntax

[yihui]

@jozefhajnala Many thanks for sharing your solution!