Working with Quarto

2024-09-05

Why Quarto?

1. communicating to decision-makers
2. collaborating with other data scientists
3. as a modern-day lab notebook where you can capture not only what you did, but also what you were thinking.

It contains three important types of content:

1. An (optional) YAML header surrounded by ---s.
2. Chunks of R code surrounded by ````.
3. Text mixed with simple text formatting like # heading and _italics_.

What happens when you render a Quarto document?

When you render the document, Quarto sends the .qmd file to knitr, https://yihui.org/knitr/, which executes all of the code chunks and creates a new markdown (.md) document which includes the code and its output. The markdown file generated by knitr is then processed by pandoc, https://pandoc.org, which is responsible for creating the finished file.

How do you maximize reproducibility with Quarto?

https://ucsbcarpentry.github.io/Reproducible-Publications-with-RStudio-Quarto/08-code-chunks/index.html#key-points

• Learn how to externally source code source()

• Learn how to modularize your code to make it more reproducible

• Use a chunk at the beginning of your document to load libraries and data globally to make your document more efficient.

How do you insert citations into a Quarto document?

Write a function for calculating the “roundness” of a POLYGON geometry. Take a look at Wikipedia for details but use the formula:

Roundness = (4π × Area) / Perimeter^2