2  Types of documents

In this chapter, we present the main types of documents and collections of scientific content that we can generate with Quarto.

2.1 Individual documents

The easiest way to work with Quarto is to create a document individual. Said document may use the sections or chunks of code to read input data or download it from some source, process them, analyze them and display the results. Graphics can be added, tables, equations, bibliographic references and many other elements.

The documents always have a standard structure:

  • Preamble: in which configuration options are specified for the creation of the document with Quarto and its associated tools.
  • Body: the section that houses the main content of the document, including sections of Markdown-formatted text and sections of code executable. The software code may be shown, if useful, or be hidden in the final result.
  • References: References are included at the end of the document bibliographical, as is usual in scientific texts.

2.2 Books

The natural evolution of the previous case is to gather a collection of documents individuals in a single book. Quarto books allows you to create this type of documents, structured in parts, chapters and sections. The options of configuration will allow you to create an introductory cover for the site website that contains the chapters (one document per chapter) or the elements necessary to create a PDF book, similar to those published by a editorial.

2.3 Articles and publications

One of the key results in any scientific process is the production of articles and publications (technical reports, etc.) that collect the results and progress achieved scientists. In this case, Quarto can also help us, with the collaboration of other essential elements such as the R package rticles, which provides templates to generate articles according to the specifications of the main scientific publications and publishers in a multitude of fields of knowledge.

2.4 Presentations

It is also possible to generate presentations (usually in HTML format) with slides through Quarto. In this case, we would have the support of several packages and environments of creating web presentations at our disposal, such as reveal.js (HTML), Beamer (for LaTeX/PDF) or MS Office PPTX format.

We will not discuss this case in this workshop, but you can obtain more information in the online guide, available at https://quarto.org/docs/presentations/.

2.5 Websites

Another option that may be interesting is to create personal websites (for example, for show our CV and a selection of featured works, publications, etc.), blogs and even corporate websites (organization, research group) quickly using Quarto. There are numerous free and paid templates now available to create websites with a beautiful look. harmonized, although we will need to learn a little HTML and CSS to be able to customize further our website.

Here is an example of an environmental technology researcher website created with Fourth: https://www.mm218.dev/. More examples of different types of websites generated with Quarto: https://drganghe.github.io/quarto-academic-site-examples.html.

More information and tutorials for creating websites with Quarto can be found at https://quarto.org/docs/websites/.

2.6 Dashboards

Finally, it is possible to create custom dashboards for monitoring. of data, analysis of models and results or for examples and teaching applications using Quarto, as described in the guide https://quarto.org/docs/dashboards/.

In this case we can include among the tools Shiny, a package software for R (also available for Python) with which to create interactive applications based into data quickly and easily.