Quarto

R
intermediate
Published

August 19, 2026

Intro

Quarto is a superset of Rmarkdown. That means that you can take an Rmarkdown, and render it as a Quarto document:

  • create a new project
  • create a new Rmd and save - if you’re new to this, or on posit.cloud, you’ll note that this requires lots of packages
  • render via the knit button to produce an HTML file

Rmarkdown depends on a couple of R packages - knitr, and rmarkdown. For example, rather than pressing the knit button, you can knit using the R expression rmarkdown::render("my_file.rmd"). As we’ll see, while Quarto looks very like Rmarkdown, the process that turns it into some kind of output format is completely different.

Rmd to qmd

Now we’ll turn our file into a Quarto file:

  • rename it by changing the filetype extension from .Rmd to .qmd
  • close and re-open your file

You should see that you’ve now got some different options available: render, rather than knit, as the most striking.

  • now render your qmd by clicking the render button

If you’re very familiar with Rmd, you’ll see that the mechanism by which our code gets converted to output is very different - there’s a background task tab where most of the interesting stuff happens. This is because Quarto rendering depends on non-R code which is installed locally (or on your remote server). That means we don’t render Quarto using the terminal, but via the console:

  • render your file by running quarto render my_file.qmd in the console

  • quarto isn’t a package: render on the command line

  • now create a quarto file and compare and contrast

    • visual editor
    • format: html vs output: html_document
    • basic markup syntax similar
    • no setup chunk

  • change format to typst/pdf/revealjs

  • execute key - eval/echo/output/warning/error/include/cache/freeze

  • output-file / output-ext

  • visual editor, citations, paste in pics

  • r code chunks + multi-language support

  • unified element syntax :

::: {.notes}
Here's my note!
:::

  • quartostamp via install.packages("pak") and then pak::pak("matt-dray/quartostamp")

  • []{.quarto-shortcode__-escaped data-is-shortcode=“1” data-value=“{{< include > }}} shortcode syntax

  • filters = changing behaviour of elements, including formatting, citations, etc https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/filters.html#var