What is Quarto? RStudio rolls out next-generation R Markdown

R Markdown has been just one of the a lot more compelling factors of the R ecosystem, creating it effortless to integrate results of R code into a text. As well as, R Markdown files can be exported to a variety of formats—Word, HTML, PDF, PowerPoint, and a lot more. You can even export entire books and internet sites.

But R Markdown has been around for 10 yrs. And as a lot more abilities were being additional by using external R deals, syntax for fundamental jobs became inconsistent dependent on, for instance, regardless of whether output was a stand-alone HTML document, HTML slide presentation, or some thing else. Furthermore, though you could run further languages besides R in just an R Markdown code chunk, it continue to was essentially designed for R.

Individuals are two of the factors RStudio has created Quarto, a following-generation, R Markdown-like publishing system. Quarto is open up supply, and it is as pleasant to Python, Julia, Observable JavaScript, and Jupyter notebooks as it is to R. It’s not a language-distinct library, but an exterior computer software software.

Just after a comfortable start of numerous months, Quarto was a main theme of this year’s RStudio Conference in late July. 

Why bother with Quarto?

If you use much more than one language, or you are on a multi-language crew, you will probably locate Quarto’s native aid for multiple languages interesting. The “high inside consistency” is another attraction, as the exact syntax will perform throughout far more languages and formats. 

“Quarto enables collaborating throughout coding languages,” Julia Stewart Lowndes, founder and co-director at Openscapes, claimed for the duration of an RStudio Convention keynote. Openscapes labored with NASA as early Quarto beta testers and uncovered that Quarto created it substantially a lot easier for Python and R people to work jointly, she mentioned.

But one of the most intriguing benefits is down the street. RStudio founder and CEO J.J. Allaire envisions cloud-centered collaboration for Quarto paperwork that will perform the exact same way Google Docs editing does now—seamlessly and with no consumers needing to explicitly use an external variation handle software like Git. Nonetheless, Allaire pressured that this functionality is not imminent. 

For now, however, Quarto was designed to get the job done similarly perfectly in Visual Studio Code and Jupyter as it does in RStudio, which the enterprise hopes will make adoption amongst groups with non-R consumers far more probably. In simple fact, people undertaking mostly text perform with very little code could use a plain text editor for Quarto files rendered HTML files can be previewed in a browser.

Allaire believes that one particular of the major Quarto advantages is help in creating YAML, the language employed for each R Markdown and Quarto doc header information and facts. YAML can be annoyingly finicky as to wherever to area colons, commas, and indentations. It is nearly like its own programming language, but without the need of the rewards of an IDE and mistake-examining. The Quarto editor has developed-in YAML help. It also aims to spotlight errors ahead of you check out rendering your doc and discovering out that it won’t operate.

And considering that Quarto is open up source, other people can lead to its performance by producing extensions. There are numerous Quarto extensions already available from the Quarto enhancement team.

One more potential advantage, dependent on your wants: You can export Quarto documents in extra than 40 different file formats which includes Word, OpenOffice, PowerPoint, ePub, Jira Wiki, Jupyter, Observable JS, entire sites, and ebooks. R Markdown can produce some of these, but not all.

There are also some valuable conversion functions, this sort of as changing in between .ipynb Jupyter notebooks and .qmd Quarto files that can be go through by any textual content editor.

Ultimately, even though R Markdown will be taken care of and up to date, “[RStudio] will almost certainly not attempt to backport Quarto capabilities into R Markdown (except if it is quite uncomplicated and usually takes small work),” RStudio engineer Yihui Xie wrote in a site put up. In other words and phrases, great new functions are a great deal more likely to surface in Quarto.

On the other hand, Quarto does not mean the finish of R Markdown. “Rest certain #rmarkdown is not heading away: We’ll carry on to work it! No want to change #rstats if you do not will need to,” tweeted Christophe Dervieux, a software program engineer at RStudio. In fact, most things you know from R Markdown probably can be applied in Quarto. And, Quarto will render R Markdown paperwork.

How is Quarto different from R Markdown?

As opposed to R Markdown, which is an R bundle, Quarto is a separate, non-R software. So in buy to use Quarto, you might very first have to have to down load and install it like you would any other software program, in this circumstance from the quarto.org “Get Started” website page. Quarto is presently included in RStudio IDE versions RStudio v2022.07.1 or later.

For Visible Studio Code, set up both equally Quarto and the VS Code Quarto extension. Quarto also functions with Jupyter Lab and any textual content editor

If you’ve employed R Markdown just before, a Quarto document will seem acquainted. There is a YAML header with a title, author, and output structure. Text makes use of a great deal of generic markdown, this sort of as pound indications for headers and bracket/parentheses syntax for hyperlinked text: [linked text](https://theurl.com). The two use a few backticks to delineate the commence and conclusion of code chunks. 

Screenshot by Sharon Machlis

A single of the greatest variances between more mature R Markdown and Quarto is how you established up solutions for code chunks. In R Markdown, chunk-particular alternatives were ordinarily put inside of curly braces defining the chunk, these kinds of as

```r chunk_identify, echo=Fake, warning=Wrong
code in this article
```

This generates a block of R code named chunk_identify that will be executed, but the code alone won’t screen in the rendered doc. And any warning messages the code may generate will not look.

In Quarto, chunk options go under the curly braces. Each and every alternative goes on its have line preceded by a pound sign and vertical character, these kinds of as

```
r
#| label: chunk_identify
#| echo: false 
#| warning: fake
```

This “hash pipe” chunk-alternative format now also functions with R Markdown documents.

For a lot more specifics on using Quarto, see the Quarto web-site or slides by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel,  a professor at Duke College who also does work at RStudio, from her RStudio Conference keynote with Stewart Lowndes.

In addition, Quarto has its ow Twitter account. And there’s the Quarto Idea a Working day weblog by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel.

If you’d like to attempt publishing a public Quarto HTML doc, RStudio released a totally free site  https://quartopub.com identical to its older RPubs for R Markdown docs.

To understand additional about the R programming language, head to the Do Extra With R tutorials page.