Really excited about quarto, but coming from blogdown/hugo world I'm struggling to understand how custom SASS themes work.  In particular, I've read https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/html-themes-more.html#bootswatch-sass-theme-files, which says:

> We’ve merged Bootswatch themes for Bootstrap 5 into this single file theme format in our repo here:
> https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/main/scss/_variables.scss

err... is that the correct link?  That appears to be the (unmerged?) official bootstrap-5 sources of the Bootstrap team, not a merged scss file in "our repo"?  (trying to better understand this single-file format deal).  

More generally, it's not clear how I would go about bringing in external bootstrap-based SASS themes.  For instance, I rather like the MIT-licensed bootstrap-5 themes from CreativeTim, like https://github.com/creativetimofficial/material-kit.  It seems like to work with quarto, I need to refactor that whole sass stack into a single .scss file, ordered specifically as quarto expects, with the five decorations described in the above link? (e.g. ` /*-- scss:uses --*/`, `/*-- scss:functions --*/`).  Is that correct?  Or do I just need to convert my sass theme to a bootswatch theme (al al https://bootswatch.com/help/#customization) ?

Maybe just my ignorance here in these things, but manually refactoring perfectly good SASS code seems like a significant and somewhat cumbersome and needless design -- e.g. compared to converting material-kit or other bootstrap-based SASS templates into hugo themes which was super straight-forward.  Maybe the answer is that users who want lower-level customization should just stick with hugo and this is out of scope for quarto?  All the same, I had hoped that quarto would lower rather than raise the barrier for user-contributed themes.  Sorry if I'm just confused?

2022-08-24T00:35:56Z
cboettig
closed
Questions/ need more advice on extending themes ?
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/issues/2086