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Comment by nemosaltat | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been running quarto [0] for a few months now and I’m happy with it. Posts are saved as .qmd, with a little bit of special front matter for formatting and tagging. `quarto render` converts the .qmd(s) according to a simple config file. [0] https://quarto.org/

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+1 for quarto. I love it for my personal website, and I use it on a daily basis to create technical reports for my day job.

Do you have any details on your workflow for reports? I “think” in .mds and the. use a VScode extension that creates to PDF on .md save with a custom/header footer template- works 95% of the time but it’s more brittle than I’d like.

So I render all of my reports to PDFs, and I work in RStudio (love/hate relationship).

As much as I love html outputs, it’s far easier to just email a pdf to my tech unsavvy stakeholders.

I’ll share my file header and config chunks with you tomorrow when I’m at the office! I’ll ping you with a separate reply.

As promised, here is my config setup for all of my quarto scripts. In RStudio, you can simply click the "Render" button on source pane of the script to render a pdf. You can also call `rmarkdown::render("file_path.qmd", output_format = "pdf_document")` to render a PDF.

FWIW, when you click "Render", this is the output command that RStudio shows: `quarto preview FILE.qmd --to pdf --no-watch-inputs --no-browse`

Of course, you will have to remember to properly format tables, omit `&` where possible in tables, figure titles, etc. There are so many nuances, but once you've got them figured out, report generation is very smooth.

    ---
    title: Title
    author: Author Name
    date: today
    date-format: long
    pdf-engine: xelatex
    format:
      pdf:
        number-sections: true
        toc: true
        toc-depth: 3
        mainfont: Roboto  # available fonts are dependent on your machine/environment
        sansfont: Roboto
        include-in-header: 
          text: |
            \usepackage{fancyhdr}
            \usepackage{lastpage}
            \usepackage{float}
            \pagestyle{fancy}
            \fancyhead[L]{\empty}
            \fancyfoot[R]{[Company] Confidential}
            \fancyfoot[C]{\thepage\ of \pageref*{LastPage}}
    ---

    ```{r setup, echo=FALSE, include=FALSE}
    knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.align = "center",
                          warning = FALSE,
                          echo = FALSE,
                          message = FALSE,
                          dev = "cairo_pdf")
    ```
    
    {{< include 001_QC.qmd >}}
    {{< include 002_ANALYSIS_FILE.qmd >}}
    <!-- And so on. -->

I’ve been waiting for them to release a standalone markdown editor, but it’s been a couple years already now.

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