Quarto: Why and How?

Aiko Voigt

Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna; https://klimadynamik.univie.ac.at

2025-06-02

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system developed by Posit (formerly RStudio).

“Quarto allows you to publish reproducible, production quality articles, presentations, dashboards, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub, and more.” (Source: quarto.org)

I first learned about it around 2022, and then forget about it. I rediscovered it again in summer 2024, and have been using it for the majority of my teaching since then.

What Quarto is not (in my experience)

  • A software to build your most fancy slide deck to pitch your multi-million Euro research proposal.
  • A software to replace LaTEX for writing scientific publications.

What Quarto is good at (in my experience)

  • Teaching
  • That is about it, but that is a lot in my view.

Why is Quarto good for teaching (student perspective)?

  • It allows you to render the same content in different formats: slides, pdf, website.
  • You can then use the slides during the lecture, and render the lecture script as a pdf that you give to the students.
  • The slides hence can focus on figures and do not need to contain a lot of written text, which is included in the lecture script.
  • The students have reported that having a script has helped them to prepare for the examens.

Why is Quarto good for teaching (teacher perspective)? 1/2

  • You only need to maintain 1 document, instead of two for a PowerPoint slide deck and a lecture script.
  • This avoids that the 2 documents drift apart.
  • You can use BibTEX for citation management, and LaTEX for equations.
  • You are freed from producing the perfect slide deck, and can put more value on the lecture script.
  • The lecture script can contain more detailed explanations and derivations that you might want to skip during the lecture.
  • I hope that this makes it also easier for other teachers to use my material, in case they need to step in for me. (But I have not tried this yet.)

Why is Quarto good for teaching (teacher perspective)? 2/2

  • You work with text files instead of PowerPoint documents.
  • This makes certain tasks much easier, such as search and replace.
  • You can use git version control (try this with PowerPoint …).

Indeed, see the gitlab repo for this slide deck

https://gitlab.phaidra.org/voigta80/quarto-why-howto/-/blob/main/simple_slides/simple_slides.qmd?ref_type=heads

Helpful things to know

  • Render to slide deck: quarto render simple_slides.qmd --to revealjs
  • Print slide deck to pdf (only works in Chrome):
    • open in Chrome
    • add ?/print-pdf in adress line: file:///C:/Users/Aiko/Desktop/quarto-why-howto/simple_slides/simple_slides.html?/print-pdf
    • print to pdf via Chrome

Quarto projects

You can use Quarto projects to prepare course content as a script, a slide deck and a website, all based on the same input file(s).

See an example project here and the rendered output.

Quarto projects: helpful things to know

  • To render the project: You need to prepare two yaml files, one for the pdf and one for the revealjs slide deck, and then render both separately.
  • You can use Lua filters to define which content is included in pdf versus revealjs output.
  • You can use the chalkboard to annotate slides.
  • There is a presenter view that lets you see the next slide.
  • You can visit website links from the slide deck and go back to the slide deck.

Quarto projects

Let us take a quick look at an example project and the rendered output.