`notebook-view.url` has no effect

[mcanouil]

Discussed in https://github.com/orgs/quarto-dev/discussions/13692

^{Originally posted by pjotrhey November 15, 2025}

Description

Hi all,

Based on the documentation, it seems that when embedding an external notebook you can redirect the notebook link to any arbitrary URL using the url field in notebook-view. I’ve tried this, but it does not work for me: the link still points to the local *-preview.html file instead of the URL provided. This is my rendered result: https://pjotrhey.github.io/

Example
I have hosted a full minimal example in a repo, see: https://github.com/pjotrhey/quarto-notebook-url-error The mainfile index.qmd is:

---
title: "Notebook URL demo"
format: html
notebook-view:
  - notebook: penguins.ipynb
    url: "https://quarto.org"
    title: "Open Quarto.org"
---

{{< embed penguins.ipynb#species-counts echo=true >}}

With this setup, the “Open notebook” link in the rendered HTML still points to the preview page (penguins-preview.html) instead of the URL specified in notebook-view.

Has anyone else run into this issue, or am I doing something (horribly) wrong?

Quartion version: 1.8.26 on Windows 11.

Thanks in advance!

[mcanouil]

This is to be a long standing issue as the behaviour is the same with 1.4.557.
This was working only in 1.3 (I tested with 1.3.450) when the feature was introduced.

[cderv]

Took some time but this was lost in a refactoring at faba735

quarto-cli/src/format/html/format-html-notebook-preview.ts

Lines 251 to 259 in c9008d7

	// Compute the final preview information that will be used
	// to form links to this notebook
	const nbPreview = {
	title: resolvedTitle,
	href: relative(inputDir, renderedNotebook[kHtmlPreview].hrefPath),
	supporting,
	resources,
	order: work.order,
	};

We need to account for descriptor.url there I think

[cderv]

This is now fixed, and we'll be in next 1.8 patch release