FAQ for R Markdown Users
What can I use Quarto for?
Quarto® is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc. You can weave together narrative text and code to produce elegantly formatted output as documents, web pages, blog posts, books and more.
Quarto sounds similar to R Markdown. What is the difference and why create a new project?
At its core, Quarto works the same way as R Markdown:
The goal of Quarto is to make the process of creating and collaborating on scientific and technical documents dramatically better. Quarto combines the functionality of R Markdown, bookdown, distill, xaringian, etc into a single consistent system with “batteries included” that reflects everything we’ve learned from R Markdown over the past 10 years.
The number of languages and runtimes used for scientific discourse is very broad (and the Jupyter ecosystem in particular is extraordinarily popular). Quarto is at its core multi-language and multi-engine (supporting Knitr, Jupyter, and Observable today and potentially other engines tomorrow).
On the other hand, R Markdown is fundamentally tied to R which severely limits the number of practitioners it can benefit. Quarto is RStudio’s attempt to bring R Markdown to everyone! Unlike R Markdown, Quarto doesn’t have a dependency or requirement for R. Quarto was developed to be multilingual, beginning with R, Python, Javascript, and Julia, with the idea that it will work even for languages that don’t yet exist.
While it is a “new” system, it should also be noted that it is highly compatible with existing content: you can render most R Markdown documents and Jupyter notebooks unmodified with Quarto. The concept is to make a major, long term investment in reproducible research, while keeping it compatible with existing formats and adaptable to the various environments users work in.
Is R Markdown going away? Will my R Markdown documents continue to work?
R Markdown is not going away! R Markdown is used extensively and continues to work well. It will continue to be actively supported. We’re not leaving R Markdown, we’re expanding our scope. Over the years there have been many feature requests, and rather than implementing them all in R Markdown, for certain features we may refer you to Quarto. Everything that is currently in R Markdown will continue to work and be supported. There are no plans for deprecation.
Read more about this in Yihui Xie’s blog post With Quarto Coming, is R Markdown Going Away? No.
Should I switch from R Markdown to Quarto?
If you like using R Markdown, there’s no need to switch! R Markdown will continue to be supported and work as it always has been. You’re welcome to try Quarto if you like, but there’s no need to switch. Some new features may only exist in Quarto, so if you want to use those, then that’s where you would give those a try.
We should emphasize that switching is not imperative. While we don’t plan on major feature initiatives in R Markdown and related packages, we are going to continue to maintain them (smaller improvements and bug fixes) for a long time to come. Furthermore, since Rmd files can in most cases be rendered without modification by Quarto, you can continue using R Markdown and the switching cost will still be minimal whenever you decide to do it.
I use X (bookdown, blogdown, etc.). What is the Quarto equivalent?
Here are the Quarto equivalents for various packages and features of the R Markdown ecosystem (in some cases Quarto equivalents are not yet available but will be later this year):
| Feature | R Markdown | Quarto |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Formats | ||
| Beamer | ||
| PowerPoint | ||
| HTML Slides | ||
| Advanced Layout | ||
| Cross References | ||
| Websites & Blogs | ||
| Books | ||
| Interactivity | Shiny Documents | Quarto Interactive Documents |
| Paged HTML | pagedown | Summer 2022 |
| Journal Articles | rticles | Summer 2022 |
| Dashboards | flexdashboard | Fall 2022 |
| Interactive Tutorials | learnr | No equivalent planned |
Can you create custom formats for Quarto like you can for R Markdown?
Not currently, but we expect that this capability will be available in version 1.0 of Quarto (which will be available before rstudio::conf in July).
When would be a good time to start new projects in Quarto rather than R Markdown?
Our current plan is to announce Quarto v1.0 at rstudio::conf (end of July). This will be a stable release that will be an excellent foundation for starting new projects with Quarto or migrating existing R Markdown projects (if you are so inclined).
Does the RStudio IDE support Quarto?
Yes! You need to use the latest release of RStudio (v2022.07), which includes support for editing and preview of Quarto documents.
You can download RStudio v2022.07 from https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/.
Does RStudio Connect support Quarto?
Yes! You can publish Quarto content to RStudio Connect v2021.08.0 or later. Quarto has to be enabled as documented in the RStudio Connect admin guide. Connect’s user documentation refers to Quarto.org docs on how to publish from the RStudio IDE. To publish Python-based Quarto content, you can use the rsconnect-python CLI from various locations, including VSCode, JupyterLab or the terminal.