The purpose of Markdown and Quarto
Introduction to Quarto and Markdown
Before learning how to create documents and reports, it is important to understand the two core technologies behind this workflow: Quarto and Markdown. These tools form the foundation for reproducible, flexible, and professional document creation.
What Is Quarto?
Quarto is an open-source publishing system designed to create high-quality, reproducible documents and websites from plain text files. It allows you to combine written content, code, data, and visualizations in a single workflow.
Quarto supports multiple programming languages—such as R, Python, Julia, and Observable—and can produce outputs in a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and PowerPoint.
Because Quarto integrates writing and computation, it is particularly well-suited for:
- Data science reports Research papers and technical documentation
- Educational materials and presentations
- Reproducible workflows and analysis pipelines
In short, Quarto bridges the gap between writing and computation, helping you communicate results in a clear and automated way.
For official documentation, installation instructions, and tutorials, see the Quarto website.
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a lightweight text formatting language. It allows you to write plain text that can be easily converted into formatted documents such as web pages or PDFs.
Instead of relying on graphical formatting tools (like bold or italic buttons), Markdown uses simple text-based markers that represent formatting instructions. The result is a writing experience that is both human-readable and machine-friendly.
Markdown was originally created by John Gruber in 2004 with the goal of making writing for the web more accessible and less cluttered by code-like markup languages such as HTML.
Markdown has since become a standard tool for technical communication, documentation, and note-taking, forming the foundation of many modern publishing systems — including Quarto.
Here you find the link to the original Markdown paper.