Quarto

A successor to LaTeX?

Dr. Andreas Maier

2022-06-30

Overview

Quarto® is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc.

Author with pandoc markdown, including equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layout, and more.
Publish high-quality articles, reports, presentations, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF , MS Word, Powerpoint, ePub, and more.
Support for interactive documents (Jupyter, Shiny, Observable)
Quarto is the successor to Bookdown/Blogdown

Advantages over LaTeX

Create dynamic content with Python, R, Julia, and Observable.
Interactive widgets (Shiny, Jupyter widgets, Observable JS)
Support for many more output formats and even whole websites and blogs

Disadvantages over LaTeX

Pandoc markdown is not a (Turing-) complete programming language
LaTeX is “the specialist” for print output
LaTeX is established since 40 years

Disadvantages over Word/Powerpoint/Keynote

No realtime layout changes (fonts, colors, etc.)
No realtime positioning of images
No advanced animations
Less advanced spell/grammer checker
Slower creation of image-heavy documents

Advantages over Word/Powerpoint/Keynote

Free, no vendor lock-in
Diffable, gitable, reproducible
LaTeX equations, code highlighting
Much better HTML output
Faster creation of text-heavy documents

Advantages over Book/Blogdown

More themes/layouts
Many more output options (e.g. presentations)
No dependency on R/RStudio and Hugo
One tool for everything and better integration with pandoc
Open source licence GPL v2

Quarto Gallery
Live demo

Summary

Quarto can
- autogenerate plots and widgets from embedded code snippets
- cross referencing (also between different websites)
- footnotes, sidenotes
- bibliography
- appendix
- DOI, Google Scholar
- …
Quarto can create HTML, Word, Powerpoint, ePub, Wikis, RTF, Jupyter, InDesign, Websites, Blogs, Books…
Quarto is not a successor of \(\text{\LaTeX}\)
Quarto is a \(\text{\LaTeX}\) generator

The End