Quarto

1 Quarto integrated website system

This section got so big I broke it out into the post quarto integrated website system. tl;dr Quarto websites are easy to set up for us content creators, but not necessarily easy for our readers, because they become slow and bloated when the website gets big.

2 Websites via hugo

Hugo is a supported backend for Quarto. This sounded like it might be an easy migration path for my blogdown, but it turns out I am not a huge fan of this approach; it breaks the tight integration with Pandoc which is IMO a major advantage of Quarto over blogdown. Blogdown works perfectly well as a Hugo frontend, so why migrate away from it if it does not gain us much?

Answer: Hugo is much faster than Quarto’s built-in system, so if you have a big site, it might be worth it. I have a faint sting of buyer’s remorse about that, but I did not notice until it was too late.

3 Websites via docusaurus

Docusaurus is a static site generator for documentation sites. It is not as homegrown as the built-in one, and has developers who really hate complexity. Maybe that means it is good? Quarto supports Docusaurus.

4 Customization

5 Slides

Slide output options are here:

• Revealjs Options
• Revealjs

TBD.

6 Jupyter support

Of course jupyter ends up being a thing. It is a little complicated, of course, as it always is when venturing into the Jupyter Cinematic Universe.

For one, jupyter notebooks are a valid frontend for Quarto. See the Quarto JupyterLab docs. It is well-documented elsewhere that I dislike jupyter notebooks as a front-end interface to any system. Fortunately it also supports normal Quarto documents as a Python front-end, which you will be unsurprised to learn I think is way better.

It is unclear to me how much of a round-trip interaction loop is supported for jupyter kernels: Quarto renders essentially a static HTML page, so I don’t believe the HTML widgets can be used to interact with the kernel, although they might have some basic animation support via javascript tricks etc. See Jupyter Widgets for some ideas.

7 Academic affordances

As an academic I want certain things in my writing tools, i.e. maths, citations and cross-references. Quarto knows about these.

• Cross References
• Citations & Footnotes

In particular, equations are referenced as follows:

Black-Scholes (@eq-black-scholes) is a mathematical model that seeks to explain the behaviour of financial derivatives, most commonly options:

$$
\frac{\partial \mathrm C}{ \partial \mathrm t } + \frac{1}{2}\sigma^{2} \mathrm S^{2}
\frac{\partial^{2} \mathrm C}{\partial \mathrm C^2}
  + \mathrm r \mathrm S \frac{\partial \mathrm C}{\partial \mathrm S}\ =
  \mathrm r \mathrm C
$$ {#eq-black-scholes}

8 Draft mode

Draft pages are well-supported now in websites, see Website Drafts.

One could probably try some more advanced sub-page draft mode via draft profile:

::: {.content-visible when-profile="draft"}
This content will only appear in the advanced version.
:::

9 Gotchas

Error running filter /Applications/quarto/share/filters/main.lua:
/Applications/quarto/share/filters/main.lua:2479: attempt to index a nil value (local 'el')

[](https://github.com)

![See @Hall2022Can — the attention economy of road signs](/images/science.abm3427-fa.avif)

:::{#fig-hallcan2022}
![](/images/science.abm3427-fa.avif)

See @Hall2022Can — the attention economy of road signs
:::

/.temp_quarto_timestamp
*.feed-full-staged
*-listing.json
/site_libs
/_site
*.html
.jupyter_cache
*.quarto_ipynb

10 Incoming

• With Quarto Coming, is R Markdown Going Away? No. - Yihui Xie
• Rob J Hyndman - Monash Quarto Templates (good examples of how to do theming for non-website stuff)