Journal Articles

Overview

Quarto supports the creation of custom formats that extend base formats like pdf, html, and docx. The custom format system is very flexible, and has been designed to accommodate the creation of articles for publishing in professional Journals.

A major focus is single-source publishing: the same Quarto document source should be capable of producing both HTML and LaTeX output, and should also be capable of creating the LaTeX required for submission to multiple Journals. Key capabilities that enable this include:

  • The ability to flexibly adapt the native LaTeX templates provided by Journals for use with Pandoc.

  • The use of spans and divs to apply formatting (which enables targeting by CSS for HTML output and LaTeX macros/environments for PDF output).

  • A standardized schema for authors and affiliations so that you can express this data once and then have it automatically formatted according to the styles required for various Journals.

  • The use of Citation Style Language (CSL) to automate the formatting of citations and bibliographies according to whatever style is required by various Journals.

Journal Formats

The Quarto team has developed several Journal formats and made them available within the quarto-journals GitHub organization. These formats include:

Many more formats will be added over time and we welcome proposals from the community for contributed formats (please post an issue at https://github.com/quarto-journals/article-format-template/issues if you are interested in contributing a format).

The quarto use template command can be used to create an article from one these formats. For example:

Terminal
quarto use template quarto-journals/acm
quarto use template quarto-journals/plos
quarto use template quarto-journals/elsevier
quarto use template quarto-journals/acs
quarto use template quarto-journals/jss

Note that the above commands will create a brand new article with default contents. In some cases you may want to use a Journal format in an existing document or project without copying the entire template. In that case you can just add the format extension by itself. For example:

Terminal
quarto add quarto-journals/acm
quarto add quarto-journals/plos

Follow the links for any of the formats above to learn more about how to use them with your own articles.

Creating Formats

While the list of supported journals on quarto-journals will grow over time, it’s likely that many users will want to create their own Journal formats. Creating a new format typically involves:

  1. Adapting the LaTeX template typically provided by Journals for use with Quarto.
  2. Selecting the appropriate citation processing and style for use with the format.
  3. Creating a template.qmd that demonstrates using the format.
  4. Optionally, ensuring that both HTML and LaTeX articles are well supported.

See the article on Journal Formats for additional details on creating your own formats.