Quarto

Quarto is an open-source publishing system that is particularly valuable for instructors who want to create dynamic, interactive course materials. Whether you’re developing lecture notes, assignments, or entire textbooks, Quarto provides a powerful, flexible platform that integrates code, data, and narrative, making it ideal for educational settings. It supports a variety of programming languages, including R, Python, Julia, and Observable JavaScript, enabling instructors to design course content that actively engages students through hands-on coding exercises and real-time data analysis.

Why Use Quarto?¶

Create Interactive Lecture Notes¶

Use Case: Developing lecture notes that integrate code, data, and narrative.

How Quarto Helps: Quarto allows you to write notes in Markdown (.qmd files) with embedded code snippets. These snippets can generate live outputs like tables, plots, and calculations directly within the notes.

Build Course Websites¶

Use Case: Hosting all course materials online in a single, accessible location.

How Quarto Helps: Use Quarto to render your Markdown files into a static site, which can be deployed on platforms like Netlify. This site can include lecture notes, assignments, schedules, and more. Eg: Stat 20 instructor Andrew Bray uses Quarto to generate stat20.org. Quarto is used to create and manage course materials, which are then rendered into a static website. This website is deployed on Netlify, a popular platform for hosting and deploying static sites. Netlify’s Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline automates the process of building and deploying your site whenever you update your Quarto files. This ensures that any changes you make to your course materials are automatically reflected on the live website without additional manual steps.

Design Assignments and Projects¶

Use Case: Creating assignments where students interact with code and data directly.

How Quarto Helps: Quarto enables you to build assignments in .qmd files that include executable code. Students can run and modify this code to complete their tasks, making the assignments more interactive and practical.

Automate Grading with Gradescope¶

Use Case: Efficiently grading assignments that involve coding and data analysis.

How Quarto Helps: Integrate Quarto into the Gradescope autograder to automatically run and check the code in student submissions. The autograder can simulate environments like DataHub, ensuring consistency in grading.

Author Books and Manuals¶

Use Case: Writing textbooks, lab manuals, or comprehensive guides.

How Quarto Helps: Quarto supports long-form content creation, allowing you to compile multiple .qmd files into a cohesive book. You can include live code examples and data analysis, making your book interactive.

Use Quarto on DataHub¶

Quarto integrates with popular Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as RStudio, VSCode and JupyterLab. You can visit this website to learn more about the detailss.

RSudio: You can create, edit, and render Quarto documents (.qmd files) directly in RStudio.

Jupyter: You cannot create/edit Quarto documents in JupyterLab, but you can convert Jupyter notebooks to various formats using Quarto’s command-line tools.

VSCode: If VSCode and VSCode Quarto extension are enabled in your hub, you can use them to render and preview quarto documents with syntax highlighting. You can also use command line tools to convert to varied documents.

Workflow for Beginner Instructors¶

Imagine you’re preparing a lecture on data visualization. You start by writing your notes in a simple Markdown file (.qmd), adding a few basic code examples that generate charts. You then use Quarto to render these notes as a PDF handout and an HTML page for your course website.

Steps to Convert Documents to HTML/PDF via Quarto¶

Convert Jupyter notebook and Quarto Markdown file to HTML¶

quarto render my-notebook.ipynb --to html

The above command converts your Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb) into an HTML file.

quarto render my-document.qmd --to html

The above command converts your Quarto Markdown file (.qmd) into an HTML file.

Convert Jupyter notebook and Quarto Markdown to PDF¶

Option 1:

quarto render my-homework.ipynb --to pdf

The above command converts your Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb) into a PDF file.

Option 2:

quarto render my-homework.ipynb --to typst

The above command converts your Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb) into a PDF file with a much cleaner output. It uses typst underneath.

Convert qmd file to PDF¶

quarto render my-document.qmd --to pdf

The above command converts your Quarto Markdown (. qmd) into a PDF.