Quarto integration/extension

[willgearty]

An rphylopic user asked me at useR if there was a way to use rphylopic within the text of a Quarto document. I couldn't come up with a great solution at the time (other than using something like the marquee package or embedding the SVG from the phylopic website), but maybe there would be a way to create a small Quarto extension where you can insert a tag with a uuid that then inserts the phylopic essentially like an emoji?

[willgearty]

Some docs:
Official quarto extensions: https://github.com/quarto-ext
Other quarto extensions: https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/listing-filters.html
Creating quarto extensions: https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/shortcodes.html

[willgearty]

I think it would be pretty easy to embed just an svg that links to the phylopic database based on a UUID, e.g.,:

{{< phylopic "171a1fd1-797b-404c-b942-604cc2c508af" 300px>}}

would become

<img src="https://images.phylopic.org/images/171a1fd1-797b-404c-b942-604cc2c508af/vector.svg" width="300px">

and would render like this:

However, things would get trickier if users wanted to embed a phylopic with a taxonomic name, etc.

[LewisAJones]

What is the extent of functionality/use cases we would want to cover? What would a Quarto extension offer that the following does not:

• Inserting phylopic via an R code chunk
• Inserting phylopic via markdown
• Inserting phylopic via html

I'm not against the idea of making a Quarto extension, I've actually wanted to make one for a couple of years, just making sure it is needed.

I think in most cases, a user would not want to use a uuid but a taxonomic (or common) name.

[willgearty]

I think I envision a PhyloPic Quarto extension would function like the fontawesome Quarto extension: https://quarto-ext.github.io/fontawesome/. I don't think there's currently a way to use an R code chunk to achieve this same kind of inline icon?

[huizezhang-sherry]

Yes, having inline icons is the usage I had in mind when talking to Will at useR. I think the fontawesome quarto extension is able to use name because the fontawesome website enforce unique names, which is not the case for PhyloPic. Maybe it is possible to have some look up functionalities like below with lua?

{{< repo_icon domain="science" name="microbiology" ... >}}

[willgearty]

Maybe the output: asis option would be useful: https://quarto.org/docs/computations/execution-options.html#raw-output.