Quarto is considered the successor to R Markdown, extending support beyond the R ecosystem to support a broader range of data science languages and environments.[3]
History
Quarto was officially announced in July 2022 at the `rstudio::conf(2022)` conference.[1] The release coincided with the corporate rebranding of the developer from RStudio to Posit. This rebranding and the launch of Quarto reflected a strategic shift to support language-agnostic data science workflows, specifically acknowledging the growing adoption of Python alongside R in scientific research.[1]
The native source format for Quarto uses the `.qmd` extension. These files are plain text files that combine Markdown with executable code blocks. Quarto can also render existing Jupyter Notebooks (`.ipynb`) into publication-quality documents without converting them to Markdown first.[1]
Functionality
Quarto is designed to support reproducible research workflows. By integrating narrative and code into a single source file, the software is intended to ensure that analysis and reporting remain consistent.[5]
Key features include:
Scientific Publishing: Native support for academic citations, bibliographies, and cross-referencing of figures, tables, and equations.[4]
Multi-format Output: A single source file can be rendered into dozens of formats, including HTML websites, PDF (via LaTeX), EPUB, and presentations (e.g., Reveal.js, Microsoft PowerPoint).[4][2]
Adoption
Quarto has been adopted in various institutions for technical reporting, official statistics, open science workflows and documentation.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has released templates and workflows for using Quarto to generate reproducible scientific manuscripts.[6]
The Deutsche Bundesbank (German Central Bank) integrates Quarto into its production of official statistics to automate "publication-ready visualisations."[8]
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) identifies Quarto as a standard platform for conducting deep, reproducible analysis in central banking.[9]
↑Hofman, N.; Heer, J. (2023). "Living Papers: A Language Toolkit for Augmented Scholarly Communication". Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp.1–13. doi:10.1145/3586183.3606791.
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