Appendix D — Technical guidance - Quarto

D.1 Quarto

Quarto is the next generation of reporting from R (specifically RMarkdown) that allows for code and text to be used together to produce a wide variety of outputs like word, pdf, PowerPoint, slides, books and websites. Quarto also allows for more flexibility in use by people who use Python and prefer to use VS Code (or other IDEs).

D.2 Installing for RStudio

The latest version of Quarto is built into the RStudio IDE itself and to update it is necessary to use download the Quarto CLI (command line interface) https://quarto.org/docs/get-started/.

The Quarto CLI download is a win.msi file so may not require authorisation from IT teams to download and install.

The package {quarto} contains functions that can be used in R to run some of the command line commands and isn’t necessary to have if you are happy to use the command line or Terminal as it is known as in RStudio. For example, to preview this book, in the command line the code is:

quarto render

but in R using {quarto} it is:

quarto::quarto_render()

R package and CLI (important)

Whilst it’s possible to use the Quarto CLI without the {quarto} package, the {quarto} package won’t run anything without the CLI as the functions are translating the code that the CLI uses.