How can I insert external links in the left sidebar?

[joelostblom]

Description

In JupyterBook, I can have links to external sites directly in the left sidebar, like this:

  - caption: Resources
    chapters:
      - url: https://dash.plotly.com/tutorial
        title: Dash documentation
      - url: https://open-resources.github.io/dash_curriculum/part1/chapter1.html
        title: Dash tutorials

Is it possible to do something similar in Quarto? Or do I have to create a separate markdown document with the links?

[mcanouil]

As book are not exclusively rendered to HTML, having chapters pointing to website, how should they be rendered for other formats? For this reason, books only takes paths to Quarto documents.

This being said, you can use a chapter with all links which will make them available in other formats such as PDF.
Or you could use the ‘tools’ to add links, see https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-navigation.html#navbar-tools.

[joelostblom]

That makes sense; I guess I'm used to how JupyterBook handles these things and what is allowed there. I am not sure what they do for PDF output in this case, but the links are helpful in the HTML book. It's not a big deal though and I will just create a separate resource page for now.

Thanks for all the help today!