Migrate from bookdown to pure Pandoc: split the HTML output in one page per section

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I have a book project in RMarkdown, but since I do not use Knitr or other RMarkdown specific features I am considering switching to pure Pandoc to remove the R burden from the dependencies.
For what concerns PDF and ePub output it seems all straightforward to me, but I have some troubles with the HTML output. In fact Pandoc generates a single HTML file with the entire book.
With Bookdown I used the gitbook HTML output which generates a page for each section and each page have the complete TOC on the left sidebar and its footnotes and partial bibliography on the bottom.
To achieve this I thought to write a md file for each section and convert them one by one with Pandoc (for the HTML output, and merge them to one unique file for converting to PDF and ePub), but in this way I cannot have references across sections, have a full bibliography at the end and also easily create a TOC.

So my question is if there is an easy way (e.g. a Pandoc filter or a script) to generate an HTML book (similar to gitbook in behavior, the style doesn't matter) without installing R and Bookdown?

pandoc
1 Answers

Pandoc follows the philosophy of only writing files that have explicitly be specified on the command line. This is why no such feature is not built in.

It would be possible to do what you want with the help of a custom writer. The basic would be doable in a few lines of Lua code, but it's likely that you'd have to implement all bookdown features yourself.

The best (IMHO) alternative is to use Quarto, a standalone tool built on top of pandoc, created in part by the authors of bookdown. That way you can remove R from your dependencies but retain the features of bookdown -- and more.

tarleb0
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