Welcome to Quarto

From course notes to journal articles to books

Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel

2023-08-06

What is Quarto?

Quarto …

is a new, open-source, scientific, and technical publishing system
aims to make the process of creating and collaborating dramatically better

A schematic representing the multi-language input (e.g. Python, R, Observable, Julia) and multi-format output (e.g. PDF, html, Word documents, and more) versatility of Quarto.

Artwork from “Hello, Quarto” keynote by Julia Lowndes and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, presented at RStudio Conference 2022. Illustrated by Allison Horst.

Quarto …

unifies + extends the R Markdown ecosystem

Quarto …

unifies + extends the R Markdown ecosystem

unifies for people who love R Markdown

Quarto …

unifies + extends the R Markdown ecosystem

unifies for people who love R Markdown

extends for people who don’t know R Markdown

Quarto unifies + extends R Markdown

Consistent implementation of attractive and handy features across outputs: tabsets, code-folding, syntax highlighting, etc.
More accessible defaults as well as better support for accessibility
Guardrails, particularly helpful for new learners: YAML completion, informative syntax errors, etc.
Support for other languages like Python, Julia, Observable, and more via Jupyter engine for executable code chunks.

Quarto, in a nutshell

Anatomy of a Quarto document

YAML

Document metadata

title: "Hello, Penguins!"
format: html
editor: visual

Rendered YAML with title (Hello, Penguins!).

title: "Hello, Penguins!"
author: Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
institute: Duke University
date: now
...
format: html
editor: visual

Rendered YAML with title (Hello, Penguins!), author (Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel), affiliation (Duke University), and published date (August 7, 2023)

Text

Markdown, that can be edited with any editor, including RStudio’s source or visual editors.

Top of the document titled penguins.qmd in the RStudio source editor, including YAML, headings, text, and a code chunk for loading packages.

Top of the document titled penguins.qmd in the RStudio visual editor, including YAML, headings, text, and a code chunk for loading packages.

Code

R code chunks executed with knitr: {r}
Python, Julia, and Observable chunks executed with jupyter: {python}

Quarto + various document types

Documents

Slides

Websites

Publications

You can already write reproducible journal articles with Quarto (like you could with the rticles and similar packages and R Markdown), and an ASA template is available!
You can now also write fully reproducible manuscripts with embedded computation and render to multiple formats!

Quarto 1.4

The manuscript project type is available in Quarto 1.4. Pre-release now available, release coming soon!

Manuscripts

Parting remarks

Quarto CLI…

orchestrates each step of rendering

A schematic representing rendering of Quarto documents from .qmd, to knitr or jupyter, to plain text markdown, then converted by pandoc into any number of output types including html, PDF, or Word document.

Artwork from “Hello, Quarto” keynote by Julia Lowndes and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, presented at RStudio Conference 2022. Illustrated by Allison Horst.

Learning more

https://quarto.org

Follow up with…

the Quarto Blog: https://quarto.org/docs/blog

Thank you!

🔗 bit.ly/teach-quarto

🐘 fosstodon.org/@minecr

✉️ mc301@duke.edu