Modular branding

[jonpeake]

Description

It would be really nice to have brand.yml files and headers act in a modular way such that two (or more) files/YAML strings can be listed under a single brand call. Currently, everything for the brand needs to happen in either a single file or a single call to brand in the YAML header of a document. This includes both set-up (setting color palettes, logo paths, and font families) and document-specific configuration (assigning color schemes using foreground/background/primary, assigning logo sizes, and fonts for body and headers). It would be useful to have the ability to handle these aspects in different files or in some combination of files and YAML header keys.

I can envision an implementation that looks something like this:
example.qmd

---
title: Example
format: revealjs
brand:
  - brand_setup.yml
  - slide_brand.yml
  - text: |
      typography:
        headings: Roboto
---
Hello world!

brand_setup.yml

color:
  palette:
    dark-blue: "#003155"
    waves: "#1EBEC7"
logo:
  images:
    company-emblem:
      path: logos/emblem.png
      alt: Company emblem
    company-logo:
      path: logos/logo.png
      alt: Company logo
    program-logo:
      path: logos/program-logo.png
      alt: Program logo
typography:
  fonts:
    - family: Arial
    - family: Open Sans
    - family: Roboto

slide_brand.yml

color:
  background: white
  foreground: dark-blue
  primary: waves

logo:
  small: company-logo
  medium: company-emblem

typography:
  base: Open Sans

[jonpeake]

Possibly related to #12774

[cscheid]

We appreciate the suggestion, but we're unlikely to do this with the syntax you've suggested because it reduces the effectiveness of validation: it becomes impossible to know whether the validation is complete or not. In addition, the array syntax is one of the possible combination semantics, but it's far from the only one. From there, someone will ask for conditional blocks and into the Turing tarpit we've now fallen.

Instead, we think a better way to do this is to have language bindings to brand libraries that allow you to create such combinations yourself. (Of course, we don't currently have many of those. But give us and the community some time)

[jonpeake]

That makes sense, appreciate the response! Good to know that there's another way that something like this could be implemented. I will admit that I'm not terribly familiar with the inner workings of Quarto and how brand gets implemented. Can you give an example of what that those language bindings might look like?

[cscheid]

They would be an R package or Python library. You'd write code to combine your piecemeal brand files as wanted and then write the result.

[cscheid]

To be clear: I don't believe that the Python library currently has those combination utility functions, but that would be the appropriate place to add them.

[jonpeake]

Ahh okay, neat. I'll monitor the development on those packages. Thanks for the help!