Render a document from a script (.R, .py)

[cderv]

This idea cames from several discussion - especially on the R side as we have knitr::spin() and rmarkdown::render() working with R script

• Support spinning of R scripts #4969
• Support .qmd in knitr::spin() yihui/knitr#2284
• Quarto convert for script files (R, py) #588

quarto render could consider rendering to output format a .R / .py script that represents a notebook.

• Existing syntax for R script to represent Notebook content (text, code, chunk option, ...): https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/spin.html
• Existing syntax for Python script to represent Notebook content: https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/formats-scripts.html

Notes

These are from internal discussion on this already

General

• This kind of feature would be opt-in to avoid rendering a script that shouldn't be. Probably by using a specific comment in the script that quarto could check

  • Example for .py : # %% [markdown] if we see this, then we auto render

    # %% [markdown]
    # ---
    # title: "My document"
    # ---
    

  • Other idea: Requiring a title field in YAML header

    • For R

      #' ---
      #' title: "My document"
      #' ---
      

    • For Python

      # %% [markdown]
      # ---
      # title: "My document"
      # ---
      

For Python

• The percent format seems a good idea considering it is widely used

This issue is to track the idea and have a place for further notes.

[kylebutts]

In this line, VSCode has support for plain .py files with the # %% code format:

This lets you work with plain text files but have the ability to view output like a notebook. If this is your development flow (like it is mine), being able to "log" the script afterwards would be delightful!

[cderv]

First work for Python

• render jupyter percent scripts #6700

[cderv]

1.4 prerelease support for rendering script using Jupyter engine
https://quarto.org/docs/prerelease/1.4/script.html

knitr engine support with spin() syntax coming soon

[kylebutts]

Getting this to work (minimally) should work for an .R script with yihui/knitr#2307

For markdown, currently you use roxygen style comments #'. Adding the option for # %% [markdown] and # %% [raw] should be possible with R raw strings with a some work on the knitr::spin function

# %% [markdown] 
r'(
# Header

Body text
)'