Quarto Templates in R Packages

When developing an R package, we sometimes might want to include a Quarto template as part of the package. There might be better ways to approach this, but my approach has been inspired by Meghan Hall’s approach

Basically, the process entails:

1. Creating the template (and any accompanying files)
2. Creating a function to copy over the template

Creating the Template

In the R package, the Quarto template should go somewhere within the inst directory. Beyond that, I’m not sure it actually matters. My approach has been to include it in inst/extdata/_extensions, but this might be a relic of the approach for using Rmarkdown.

Regardless, if (for example), I’m making a template for a school report, I might structure the folder like:

inst/extdata/_extensions/SchReport/template.qmd

And then I can define the template however I want. I would also want to include any .css or .scss files in the SchReport directory.

Note! Despite the naming, these templates are not the same as extensions. A Quarto Extension should probably have its own package, since it should be content-agnostic

Creating a Utility Function

Once the template is created, we then want a function to copy that template (and any supplemental files) over to wherever we want to work with it.

My version of the function that does this is similar to Meghan Hall’s version.

I might have something like:

use_report_template <- function(file_name, ext_name = "SchReport", edit = FALSE) {
	#some checks for input arguments
	ext_path <- paste0("_extensions", ext_name)	
 
	#copy from pkg to current dir
	file.copy(
	from = system.file(paste0("extdata/_extensions/", ext_name), package = "MyPkg"), #note that this should be the pkg name
    to = paste0("_extensions/"),
    overwrite = TRUE,
    recursive = TRUE,
    copy.mode = TRUE
	)
 
	pth <- paste0(ext_path, "/template.qmd")
	file.copy(pth, paste0(file_name, ".qmd", collapse = ""))
 
	if (edit) {
		file.edit(paste0(file_name, ".qmd", collapse = ""))	
	}
}

This copies over the relevant template folder (SchReport in this case) from MyPkg into the current directory and creates a new .qmd file named whatever we supply to the file_name argument.

We can then render this template using the typical quarto render CLI workflow.