2  Book Structure

A book could be just a list of chapters or it could be organized into multiple parts. There is also possible to have some appendices.

2.1 The _quarto.yml file

The _quarto.yml file specifies the structure of the book and different configuration options to render the book.

The _quarto.yml for a typical book looks as follows.

book:
  title: "My Awesome Book"
  author: "Norah Jones"
  date: "11/2/2023"
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - intro.qmd
    - summary.qmd
    - references.qmd

Each qmd file cooresponds to a chapter.

The first entry index.qmd usually contains the preface of the book. It is be called index.qmd so that it serves as home page when the book is rendered as a website.

2.2 Titles

The _quarto.yml only contains the filenames. The title of each chapter is specified in the corresponding file with a level-one header.

# Introduction

...

2.3 Organizing Book into Chapters

To add more chapters to the book, you need to:

1. create a new file for each chapter and add title on the top
2. include that in the list of chapters in _quarto.yml in the required order.

For example, to add a chapter titled Book Structure, I need to do the following two things.

Create a file book-structure.qmd with a title.

# Book Structure

...

And include that file in _quarto.yml.

book:
  title: "My Awesome Book"
  author: "Norah Jones"
  date: "11/2/2023"
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - intro.qmd
    - book-structure.qmd
    - summary.qmd
    - references.qmd

2.4 Organizing Book into Parts

For some books, it is more natural to organize the book into multiple parts. Here is how you do it with Quarto.

Typically, when there are multiple parts, it is a good idea to create a directory for each part and add a file with name index.qmd as the description of the part.

Support we want to add a part with title Animals with chapters for Elephants, Tigers and Lions.

The first thing to do is a to create a directory structure as follows.

animals/
├── elephants.qmd
├── index.qmd
├── lions.qmd
└── tigers.qmd

The animals/index.qmd file will be something as follows.

# Animals

This part describes about various animals.

Once we create all the files and add titles, we can list them in the _quarto.yml file as follows.

book:
  title: "My Awesome Book"
  author: "Norah Jones"
  date: "11/2/2023"
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - intro.qmd
    - part: animals/index.qmd
      chapters:
        - animals/elephants.qmd
        - animals/tigers.qmd
        - animals/lions.qmd
    - summary.qmd
    - references.qmd