What is htmlbook?

If you've written a book using Quarto and want to publish it through O'Reilly, this tool bridges the gap. It converts your Quarto book into O'Reilly's specific HTML format, so you can get your manuscript onto their publishing platform without manually reformatting everything. The workflow is straightforward. You first render your Quarto book as you normally would, then run a single command from this tool. It generates a new folder containing the HTML files ready for O'Reilly's Atlas platform. You do need to manually handle one piece: updating a configuration file to make sure your chapters appear in the right order. The tool handles the core elements of a technical book: overall structure with parts and appendices, figures, code blocks, cross-references, callouts, and footnotes. The author notes it's "far from perfect," but it has been used successfully on two real books, R for Data Science and R Packages, so it works for production-quality publishing. This is a niche tool for a specific audience: authors who write in Quarto (popular in the R and data science community) and publish through O'Reilly. If you're not in that intersection, you likely won't need it. But if you are, it saves what would otherwise be a tedious manual conversion process.