Working with Quarto

2026-03-25

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.