Quarto Manuscripts

Overview

Quarto manuscript projects provide a framework for writing and publishing scholarly articles. A Quarto manuscript lets you:

Use one or more notebooks or .qmd documents as the source of content and computations, and then publish these computations alongside the manuscript, allowing readers to dive into your code.
Produce manuscripts in multiple formats (including LaTeX or MS Word formats required by journals), and give readers easy access to all of the formats through a manuscript website.

The output of a Quarto manuscript is a website (live example). The article itself appears as the content of the website, and can include all the elements common to scholarly writing like figures, tables, equations, cross references and citations. The website also makes available other formats (e.g. PDF, Docx) as well as links to all of the computations used to create the article.

A screenshot of the content area on the manuscript webpage. Content shows a title block including the article title, authors, and abstract, body text, and an image with a caption. — Article Content

On the right, you’ll see navigation: a table of contents for the article itself followed by links to Other Formats, Notebooks and Other Links.

Other Formats

These links allow a reader to download alternative formats of your article. In this example, there is an MS Word version that may be useful for a reviewer to provide feedback and a PDF version that uses the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) template. Additionally, there is a MECA archive, a zip file that is designed to capture your article and its supporting documents into a single file suitable for sending to a publisher.

Notebooks

These are links to notebooks included in the manuscript. The “Article Notebook” is the notebook version of the article itself. In this example, “Data Screening” is a notebook from which a single cell is embedded in the article. Any other notebooks that are included in the project, even if they are not directly used in the article will also appear here.

When a reader visits any of these notebook links, they are served an HTML version of the notebook, allowing them to view the code and output without leaving their browser. In addition, a link to download the source code of the notebook is also provided.

Screenshot of the notebook view of data-screening.ipynb. The top of the page has a link Back to the Article and a button to Download Notebook. The content of the page includes some text and a cell displaying code. — HTML view of the Data Screening notebook

Get Started

Install Quarto

Manuscripts are a feature in the 1.4 release of Quarto. Before you get started, make sure you install the latest release version of Quarto.

_ Find your operating system in the table below

Highlights

Quarto 1.5 includes the following new features:

Typst CSS—Format tables with borders and colors, and the formatting will be transferred from HTML to Typst.
Typst 0.11.0—Typst tables have feature parity with other formats, with colspans, rowspans, and alignment of individual cells.
Website Draft Mode—Improved support for workflows involving draft posts and pages:
- Adds the drafts option to the website key offering new ways to specify drafts: directly in _quarto.yml, and via metadata includes and profiles.
- Introduces the draft-mode option to the website key to control how drafts are rendered. Drafts can be gone, unlinked or visible.
- Adds a draft banner to draft pages that are rendered.
- Improves the linking behaviour of draft documents. Now, in addition to being excluded from search results, listings, and the sitemap, drafts will not appear in navigation, or be linked from in-text hyperlinks when draft-mode is gone or unlinked.
- Changes the behavior of quarto preview for drafts. Drafts will be visible in previews regardless of the draft-mode setting. In particular, this allows an easier way to preview the appearance of draft content in navigation and listings.
Website Announcement Bar—Add an announcement bar to your website.
Placeholder Image Shortcodes—Easily add placeholder images to your documents ({{< placeholder >}}).
Lorem Ipsum Text Shortcodes—Easily add lorem ipsum text to your documents ({{< lipsum >}}).
Native Julia Engine—Execute Julia code in Quarto documents without requiring Jupyter.
Project Pre Render Scripts—Project metadata and the render list are now re-computed after any pre-render scripts have executed.
Element-wide disabling of HTML table processing—Declare the comment  anywhere in an HTML RawBlock.
Shortcode context awareness—Shortcode handlers can be made aware of their invocation in block, inline or text contexts.

Release Notes

You can find release notes and installers for all platforms in the download page.

Choose Your Tool

You can author Quarto manuscripts in any tool or notebook editor. The tutorials below walk you through authoring Quarto manuscripts with a few common tools.

Choose your tool to start learning:

Jupyter

VS Code

RStudio