Some history and context
How can we make beautiful documents?
Specifically, how would a programmer solve this problem?
These slides will focus on open standards with open-source implementations.
The input is always going to be a plain text document, with some special “markup”.
Looks like:
\section{Introduction}
In this paper we will consider $x$ and $y$.
\begin{itemize}
\item List item 1.
\item List item 2.
\end{itemize}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics{graph1}
\caption{An example graph.}
\label{fig:graph1}
\end{figure}Looks like:
<h1>Introduction</h1>
<p>In this paper we will consider <i>x</i> and <i>y</i>.</p>
<ul>
<li>List item 1.</li>
<li>List item 2.</li>
</ul>
<img src="graph1.png">Looks like:
# Introduction
In this paper we will consider *x* and *y*.
- List item 1.
- List item 2.
Donald Knuth had another important idea, literate programming.
(The idea has developed a bit since Knuth introduced it though.)
From a source text file we will weave together a beautiful document:
We will also call this knitting or rendering.
Quarto (2022) is the latest iteration of these ideas about creating documents by writing plain text, and literate programming.
Builds on top of various older packages, so we will see reference to older knitr and rmarkdown packages.
Allows literate programming in R, Python, other languages.
Can output many formats, output different formats from same source.
Quarto is developed by Posit (formerly known as RStudio).
Similar ideas: Jupyter Notebooks in Python, Observable in Javascript
<xml>
XML (1990s) is like HTML for data.
<item>Easily usable by both people and software!</item>
<item>People became very excited about XML for a while.</item>
<item>Turned out to actually be awful for both people and software.</item>
</xml>
{
"JSON" : "JSON (2000s) represents data as you would in Javascript.",
"items" : [
"Also very similar to how Python represents data, and lists in R.",
"JSON was better, but still a bit ugly.",
]
}
YAML: "YAML (2001) makes some JSON punctuation optional, uses indentation like Python."
items:
- YAML has some advanced features you can ignore.
- YAML is a popular configuration format.
- YAML is... fine.
- Quarto uses YAML for configuration, in the header of documents and in the _quarto.yml configuration file.