Hi there, member of Quarto team here. Quarto is actually being created by the same core group that created R Markdown. It's essentially the same idea but implemented in a cross-language fashion. I should also note that it is designed to be highly compatible w/ existing formats (you can render nearly all R Markdown documents as well as Jupyter Notebooks unmodified w/ Quarto).
This is all great. It's high time we supplemented Jupyter with a plain text language-agnostic format. Jupyter is a nice notebook but falls short of an effective format for shareable, reproducible, collaborative research.
Thanks for developing this wonderful tool. Just tried it. The HTML output looks great.
I use R Markdown extensively. I am wondering if R Markdown is retiring? Should I begin to switch to Quarto? And is there a way to change the default code font to ligatures fonts (for example Fira Code)?
Quarto is the next generation of R Markdown, so over time it will surpass R Markdown in features/capability (I think in most areas it already has). Note that Quarto will read and render existing Rmd files without modification, so when you decide to switch isn't a terribly big deal. You can use the monofont option to specify an alternate code font.
So is the main difference instead of using the R markdown package to compile a PDF or whatever you use a standalone tool? I'm not quite sure what cross-language means here I guess. Does Quarto also offer more beyond what R markdown does in functionality? A quick glance at your site didn't show anything but I didn't look too hard TBH.
The idea is that we've separated running computations into pluggable "engines" (whereas in R Markdown everything was hard-coded to use R/Knitr). In Quarto we can use Knitr, or Jupyter, or Observable JS (and can add additional engines in the future). R Markdown was a tool created exclusively for R users whereas Quarto is for users of any language that want to create reproducible documents with Pandoc/markdown.
