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Quarto is a new open-source scientific and technical publishing system that claims to be the "next generation version of R Markdown from RStudio". I'm an avid RMarkdown user and I have not yet fully understood what are the advantages of using Quarto over RMarkdown. Both seems very similar.

Are there important differences between RMarkdown and Quarto to be aware of?

Maël
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1 Answers1

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The key differences, and advantages for me, of using qmd instead of rmd include:

Other details I find satisfying:

  • fully mostly back compatible with Rmd
  • works well in VS Code, Emacs, etc., it's less bound to RStudio as an IDE
Ben
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    FWIW Rmarkdown worked perfectly fine in Emacs for a decade. That is not new. I see it mostly as a 'v2' rewrite / rethink / generalization and that should be good enough for new content. – Dirk Eddelbuettel Aug 02 '22 at 21:16
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    "fully back compatible with Rmd" isn't an advantage of Quarto *over* Rmarkdown, is it? :-) (TBH the only one of these that appeals to me is the flexible layouts, *if* they really work equally well across all output formats https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20847371/two-column-layouts-in-rstudio-presentations-slidify-pandoc ... ) – Ben Bolker Aug 02 '22 at 21:31
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    @BenBolker yes, good point, I've now split my list into 'advantages' and 'details I like'. I feel your pain on the flexible layouts (see my ugly answer to the Q you link to, haha). Let's see if they can pull it off with quarto. Dirk, yes, to clarify, I mean simpler for non-CS beginners to use with IDEs that are not RStudio, compared to Rmd – Ben Aug 02 '22 at 23:13
  • Nice answer. When you say works well in other IDEs, do you mean syntax highlighting? vscode is pretty good at that with rmd, but it lacks the in-IDE cell execution and output preview. Are you saying there are IDEs that can do that with Quarto? – SamR Aug 03 '22 at 06:45
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    What are the advantages of setting chunk options via hashpipes (`#| echo = FALSE`) versus putting those options in the chunk delimiters (```{r echo = FALSE}`)? (Besides the pot-friendly moniker.) – wes Sep 02 '22 at 06:14
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    It isn't actually fully back compatible with Rmd. For example, `rgl` output works better in R Markdown than in Quarto (because Quarto does some really bad simulation of some knitr internals), and https://stackoverflow.com/q/73999697/2554330 is another example where R Markdown features fail in Quarto. – user2554330 Oct 08 '22 at 20:13
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    I don't know if you have also experienced that @Ben, but when I changed from bookdown to quarto my runtime decreased significantly. – Julian Oct 17 '22 at 08:26