Ready4R (2024-08-28): Quarto, Quarto, Quarto (at PositConf)!
PositConf highlights: new Quarto themes, scrollytelling with closeread, custom PDF outputs with Typst. Stay tuned for more!
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Hi all,
Continuing my recap of PositConf. I thought I’d highlight some more nifty new things with Quarto.
Keynote from Melissa Van Bussel
Melissa Van Bussel is well known for her many videos on generative AI. In this talk, she talked about her various feels about Generative AI, such as being excited and tired of it at the same time.
One of the nifty applications she showed was a Shiny App to build Quarto Themes using simple prompts, such as “abstract purple minimal”, and it sent an API request to OpenAI to develop the theme. You can check it out here:
https://melissavanbussel.shinyapps.io/quarto_theme_generator
Scrollytelling using {closeread}
Andrew Bray gave a presentation talking about the {closeread} package that works as a quarto plugin to make scrollytelling documents.
Scrollytelling is a way of advancing/scrolling through a document via scrolling that incrementally builds on visualizations. I’m not explaining it very well, so check out an example: Tufte’s Minard’s Map
Check out more about closeread here:https://closeread.netlify.app/
Custom Quarto Outputs using Typst
Typst is a new PDF typesetting language that can be used as a Quarto render output. It is designed to be easier to customize than LaTeX, and is extremely powerful.
David Keyes (of R for the Rest of Us fame) gave a great talk about doing parametrized Quarto docs with Typst. His slides are here:
https://rfor.us/posit2024slides
Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel also talked about using Quarto in writing books, including examples from R for Data Science, with some tips and tricks for making sure that things translate from HTML books to PDF ones. Her slides are here: https://bit.ly/books-conf24.
Signing Off
There were a lot more presentations about Quarto, including Cynthia Huang’s presentation on Quarto for note-taking and knowledge management, and Abigail Haddad’s presentation on using GitHub / Quarto to build a professional profile. I don't have links for these, but be sure to check them out when the presentations go live on YouTube.
I still have a few more newsletters in me to talk about PositConf, so stay tuned. Thanks again for reading!