Multilingual documents (with tabs)

The goal is to create multilingual documents in Quarto where the languages are compiled in parallel across codeblocks and you can navigate between languages using a tab.

Fortunately, people have already solved this problem. And the solution is rather neat. Here, I am following the guidance laid out by Isabella Velasquex in this Posit Blog. Two solutions are offered: the Quarto “tabsets” or a user-written extension called “tabby”.

Here, I demonstrate a simple implementation of tabsets for R and Python. Note, I am compiling this .qmd file in RStudio. No specific kernel/engine is required.

Implementation

You can implement tabs in the following way

:::{.panel-tabset}

## R

```{r}
print("Hello, R World!")
```

## Python

```{python}
print("Hello, Python World!")
```
:::

The output will look as follows:

print("Hello, R World!")

[1] "Hello, R World!"

print("Hello, Python World!")

Hello, Python World!

Syncing

A nice feature of tabset (and tabby) is that you can get tabs to sync: if you select R in one part of the document (website, e-book, etc.) all tabs in that group switch to R. This is achieved by specifying a group, within which all labels (i.e., ## R) are matched. For example,

:::{.panel-tabset group="languages"}

## R

```{r}
print("Hello, R World!")
```

## Python

```{python}
print("Hello, Python World!")
```
:::

The output looks just the same, but selecting one tab below does not change the tabs above.

print("Hello, R World!")

[1] "Hello, R World!"

print("Hello, Python World!")

Hello, Python World!

Now, if I create a second tabset using the same group identifier, you will see that the two are synced.

print("Hello again, R World!")

[1] "Hello again, R World!"

print("Hello again, Python World!")

Hello again, Python World!

This feature is particularly nice for programming languages, but also has other use cases. Tabsets can be used to display any type of output; for example, graphs alongside the data that underpins them (see example). Groups are a useful tool for linking the output of one tabset to another.

Syncing across tabsets

If you open one of the rendered html files on your local machine, this syncing feature will not work unless the html is self-contained. To see the syncing feature you need to preview the site (or page). You can do this by typing quarto preview in the RStudio terminal. You will know that the you are looking at the preview by the URL displayed in your browser: it will start with “localhost:”.

For a while, I was certain that the syncing in my html files was broken because of the different ways I was executing Stata code across .qmd files. Turns out, it was a much simpler problem.