Absolute URLs in downloads

[afeld]

I teach a class for people who are new to coding. The course sites is built with Jupyter Book, published on ReadTheDocs. To do their assignments / play with the lecture code, I have them download the notebooks from the site and then load them up in JupyterLab locally.

When using internal references with Markdown link syntax, the notebook (and PDF) downloads that Jupyter Book provide still use the relative paths. Example:

[Second page](page2.md)

stays the same in the downloaded notebook, even though page2.md doesn't necessarily exist in the same directory on their machine. Therefore, that link will be broken, which is confusing. I'm looking for a way to use internal references in my source notebooks/Markdown, but then have those links converted to absolute URLs for the notebook and PDF downloads. (Making all links on the site absolute as well would be acceptable, if that's easier.)

Ditto for images sources in Markdown files/cells.

Things I considered/tried

Workaround	Pros	Cons
Have them clone the Git repository (instead of downloading notebooks individually	Relative links would work; they can pull the latest	They need to learn / deal with Git, including merge conflicts
Have them download all course files as a ZIP	Relative links would work, easy on students	Students wouldn't get updates to the files as I make them
Setting myst_all_links_external: true		Didn't solve the problem
Use absolute URLs in the source Markdown cells/files*	They remain absolute	More verbose; reference checks don't work
Use a Sphinx extension to convert relative URLs to absolute	Made absolute automatically	I don't know much about how Sphinx works, or if the right hooks are available

*This is what I'm currently doing.

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That all make sense? Thoughts?