Building the quick reference guide as a html file doesn't allow it to use the Jekyll templates (header, navbar, footer). We also can't reference those templates in the terms.tmpl as jinja2 and jekyll work slightly different.
But by building the quick reference to a markdown document (with just the content, no html header etc.) it can be picked up by Jekyll like any other markdown file. The markdown file does contain mostly html, so we can style it exactly like we want.
Peter Desmet