“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 …).
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.