Quarto Showcase

Julien Brun, Renata G. Curty, Greg Janée, Jairo Melo-Flórez, Sam Shanny-Csik

UC Santa Barbara & NCEAS

Outline

• Brief introduction to Quarto
• Showcase 4 project types
  • Website
  • Presentation
  • Journal article
  • Dynamic code execution
• Our goal
  • Show what’s possible
  • Show how (easily) it was put together

This is not a tutorial on how to use Quarto.

We will have time at the end for Q&A.

What is Quarto?

“An open-source scientific and technical publishing system”

• Formerly R Markdown by RStudio
• Now Quarto by Posit
  • (More) agnostic with respect to programming language
  • Or, not tied to computation at all
• Why are we showing you this today?
  • Simple, powerful, effective tool
  • We’re fans

This quote and the following are from Quarto’s advertising. Over the next few slides we’ll tease apart what “publishing system” means.

Used to be very centered around the R programming language.

These slides are an example of using Quarto unrelated to programming or computation.

Authoring

“Author using Jupyter notebooks or with plain text markdown in your favorite editor”

• Not like Microsoft Word; not a monolothic application
• Not a monolithic file format
• Rather, create everything via simple text files
• Manage and render from IDEs (Jupyter, RStudio, VS Code) or the command line

IDEs are also just fancy text editors and previewers.

Dynamic content

“Create dynamic content with Python, R, Julia, and Observable”

• Heritage: computational notebooks
  • Combine exposition, code, plots, figures, etc. in one document
  • Read a notebook… or run it!
  • Great for reproducibility, communication
• Now: create publications that have nothing to do with code

Production

“Publish reproducible, production quality articles, presentations, dashboards, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub, and more”

• Lots of pre-packaged options that get you going quickly
• Lots of pre-built templates and styling that make things look good

Publication

“Share knowledge and insights organization-wide by publishing to Posit Connect, Confluence, or other publishing systems”

• (Who cares about those?)
• The real value: integration with GitHub and GitHub Pages
  • Text files work well for collaborating with git
  • Publish/host via GitHub Pages with a button click
• All rendering (to HTML, to PDF, etc.) is automated

Posit Connect is proprietary.

Features

“Write using Pandoc markdown, including equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layout, and more”

• Yes, there are lots of features
• More importantly:
  • Simple things are simple
  • More complex things are possible
• Lots of customization hooks
• Copious help via Quarto documentation, web search, Stack Overflow

The more important thing than having features is that you don’t have to use them, but it’s easy to incrementally add them in.