Writing a book with Quarto | Hacker News Reader

Writing a book with Quarto

blog.stephenturner.us

27 pointsterryds5 comments

I used reveal.js and quadro to make lecture slides. And as much as I wanted to like it, it never worked out.

For easy presentations and pitch deck I'm sure it works well.. But the people behind those tools do not seem to have the experience of working with structured lecture notes.

When teaching you need many tools, such as background removal from images, easy cropping, arrows, animating the text in a predefined order, easy positioning and alignment, etc.. Both tool do not offer easy ways to do all of this, even with plug-ins. And the export to a nice pdf is not trivial at all.

At some point I realized that I was spending more time writing html and Javascript than doing the slides. I went back to PowerPoint, and with the same time it took me to make one lecture note in quadro, I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better.

So, sadly, this is not yet for me.

What I was looking for:

- easy versioning (good)

- embedding python scripts (good)

- code coloration (good)

- maths (good)

But without the normal features of PowerPoint, the price is too high.

I also use tools like reveal.js or slidev for lecture slides now and then, and almost always come to regret it. It easily explodes into cascades of hacks if you need anything but the basic layouts offered out the box. Quite basic things like positioning images can become a real faff.

I really like slides.com, which is a web front end to reveal.js, I’ve used it for a few things, and it lets you export the reveal.js html and JavaScript, so you know you won’t lose it.

It’s not perfect, but as you say, whenever I’ve made a slide deck outside a gui I’ve regretted it. Quarto is better for documents, but still has rough edges.

My experience with quarto + revealjs on the other hand has been great. I'm an economist, which means my slides only ever have text (usually short bullets) + literature references + equations + graphs (and rarely, outright image files). So for me, revealjs with quarto works out perfectly because in the same .qmd file I write the paper I already write up the slides, so everything is in the same place and I can simply choose if I want to re-render the paper PDF or the presentation .HTML file.

I used quarto for my book as well and have a write up, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2024/07/02/some-notes-on-self-pub...

One nice thing about Quarto, is that I could have different fonts and formatting niceties for the epub vs PDF version (which the PDF version is the one I use to sell a paperback copy).

Additionally wrote a little script to auto-translate the contents from the markdown, so currently have the book available in Spanish and French as well.

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