Allow additional sources for preview

[omsai]

Description

I'm rendering a PDF that includes images generated separately by bookdown. However the preview source being watched by quarto preview is limited the single source qmd file. It would be great if quarto preview considers external dependency images and rebuild when those are updated.

I don't see this feature mentioned in the documentation, in https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/blob/main/src/command/preview/cmd.ts or among other issues and discussions.

[mcanouil]

Duplicate of:

• quarto preview does not update all pages when project-wide contents change #10392
• quarto preview on a website project not watching resources on repeat previews #7385
• Preview not updated on changes to included files #2795

Please search in issues and discussions before opening new threads. Thank you.

[omsai]

None of those issues apply to the feature I'm requesting here: I'm asking about setting arbitrary external dependencies to the preview watch list.

#2795 (comment) gets close to what I'm asking for although that has a narrower context to the project dependency, not an external dependency outside the project directory.

[mcanouil]

Sorry, but do you want for Quarto to watch resources not used?
The issues are about used resources not being watched, this should cover your use case.

[omsai]

My project structure is

01-book-chapter.Rmd
02-book-chapter.Rmd
...
_book/_main_files/figure-html/*.png
manuscript/manuscript.qmd

Those png files are not in the root directory of the quarto manuscript directory. I'm not aware of anyway of triggering quarto preview to rebuild based on those files being updated.

[mcanouil]

I'm afraid this is unlikely to happen because this would go against the main design of projects being self-contained.
For instance, inside Quarto projects, paths starting with / mean relative to the root of the project.

So, the issue is not even a "preview" issue. The issue is you want to do something that conflict with Quarto's design.

[mcanouil]

You could try hard or symbolic links to put your resources at the right place.