Building Quarto Extensions

Welcome

Welcome to the Building Quarto Extensions book! This book aims to provide you with the knowledge and skills needed to create, publish, and maintain extensions for the Quarto publishing system.

Quarto has revolutionized scientific and technical publishing by providing a unified authoring framework for data science and technical communication. Extensions enhance Quarto’s capabilities, allowing for customized formats, interactive elements, specialized shortcodes, and much more.

Whether you’re looking to customize Quarto for your organization, contribute to the open-source community, or solve specific publishing challenges, this book will guide you through the entire process of extension development.

What You’ll Learn

In this book, you will:

• Understand Quarto’s architecture and extension system
• Set up a development environment for creating extensions
• Build various types of extensions, from simple shortcodes to complex formats
• Learn best practices for testing, debugging, and publishing extensions
• Explore real-world case studies and applications

How to Use This Book

This book is designed to be read sequentially, as later chapters build upon concepts introduced earlier. However, experienced Quarto users may choose to jump directly to specific sections of interest.

Code examples are provided throughout, and you are encouraged to experiment with them in your own development environment. Each chapter concludes with exercises to reinforce your learning.