The purpose of Markdown and Quarto
Introduction to Quarto and Markdown
Before learning how to create documents and reports, it helps to understand the two core technologies behind this workflow: Quarto and Markdown. Together, they form the foundation for reproducible, flexible document creation.
What Is Quarto?
Quarto is an open-source publishing system for creating reproducible documents and websites from plain text files. It combines written content, code, data, and visualizations in a single workflow, supports multiple programming languages (R, Python or Julia), and can render to formats including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and PowerPoint.
Because it integrates writing and computation, Quarto is well-suited for data science reports, research papers, educational materials and presentations, and reproducible analysis pipelines more generally.
For official documentation, installation instructions, and tutorials, see the Quarto website.
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a lightweight text formatting language: you write plain text with simple text-based markers (rather than graphical formatting buttons) that get converted into formatted output such as web pages or PDFs. The result is a writing experience that is both human-readable and machine-friendly.
Markdown was created in 2004 to make writing for the web simpler than working directly in HTML, and it has since become a standard tool for technical writing and documentation, forming the foundation of many modern publishing systems — including Quarto.
Here you find the link to the original Markdown paper.
You’re writing a lab report where a table of results needs to update automatically every time you rerun your analysis. Would plain Markdown or Quarto be the right tool for this, and why?
Quarto. Markdown only provides text formatting; it has no way to execute code or generate results. Quarto builds on Markdown by adding a computation layer, so tables and figures can be generated from your analysis and stay in sync with your data.