Getting Started with Quarto

An introduction to Quarto — the modern successor to R Markdown — covering how to create documents that mix text and code, control output rendering, and produce HTML and PDF reports.

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Quarto is a modern, multi-language successor to R Markdown. The core idea is simple: write text and code in the same document, render it, and get a polished report, paper, or website. Quarto handles the conversion — you focus on the content.

This website is itself written in Quarto, which gives you a sense of what is possible with the tool even for everyday writing tasks.

Video lecture

1 Required reading

Work through these in order — they cover everything you need to get started:

1. The CommonMark markdown tutorial — markdown is the text-formatting language inside every Quarto document; this interactive tutorial takes about 10 minutes
2. Quarto tutorial I: the basics
3. Quarto tutorial II: computations
4. Quarto tutorial III: authoring

2 Exercise

Create a new Quarto document where you set the title, date, and author explicitly. Write a sample text that includes:

• at least one level-1 heading
• at least two level-2 headings
• a YAML option that hides R code by default
• one R chunk where both the code and output are shown
• one R chunk that produces a ggplot2 figure, with the code hidden

Then do the following:

1. Render to HTML with a floating table of contents and a custom theme.
2. Publish the HTML via Netlify Drop and add a download link for the source file. (The HTML file must be named index.html for Netlify Drop to work.)
3. Render to PDF and include a table of contents.

TipSample solution

A sample solution is available as a GitHub Gist. The rendered Netlify version is here.

You can also practice with the interactive Quarto exercise set from the DataScienceExercises package (see the blog post on how to install and run it):

learnr::run_tutorial(
  name = "Quarto",
  package = "DataScienceExercises",
  shiny_args = list("launch.browser" = TRUE)
)

3 Further reading

• We don’t talk about Quarto — a readable blog post introducing Quarto
• Quarto and R Markdown — context on the transition from R Markdown
• Markdown basics — the full Quarto markdown reference
• The comprehensive Quarto documentation
• The R Markdown Cookbook — still relevant for understanding the ecosystem