Incorporating _brand.yml

[jmarshrossney]

The _brand.yml configuration file defines colours, typography, logos and layouts for maintaining consistent branding across formats.

In principle, _brand.yml should allow us to single-source this information. Thus, templates should only need to define structural elements specific to their specific format.

However, _brand.yml is in the very early stages of being integrated in the Quarto ecosystem, so the documentation in sparse and not everything works 'out of the box' right now.

In particular, it is not yet clear to me how best to incorporate a _brand.yml held in a separate GitHub repository into these templates. Note that _brand.yml is more general than Quarto, so it should not live alongside these templates.

My current workflow involves symlinking both _brand.yml and the logos/ directory into the project directory, but this is not how I expect this to work going forward; the documentation suggests that you can simply point to the location of your _brand.yml in the document front matter. However, when I do this, the logos are not discovered, despite the documentation stating that all paths in _brand.yml are relative to that file. So, I expect these issues to be ironed out soon, and some more 'official' guidance on combining templates and branding.

[jmarshrossney]

Another possibility would be to include ukceh-rse/brand-yml as a submodule.

This ought to reduce the effort for users, who should then only have to run quarto use template or quarto add. It makes things a little more tricky for maintainers, but perhaps a good excuse to learn how to use submodules?