Writing dissertations with Quarto

Stefano Coretta

Writing dissertations/theses

  • Large piece of writing.

  • Several chapters, cross-references, figures, tables, citations and bibliography.

  • Iterations of writing and editing, with supervisor’s input.

  • Writing long pieces in Word is a pain!

Quarto

  • Quarto is a “publishing system”.

  • Quarto renders one or more Quarto files (.qmd) into a document.

  • Quarto uses pandoc to output different formats: HTML, PDF, ebooks, presentations… and even MS Word!

  • Quarto can also create full websites and books!

You will learn how to write a dissertation using Quarto Books.

Create a Quarto Book project

Follow DEMO.

Self-study

  • You can go through the Tutorial: Authoring for a brief introduction to writing documents with Quarto.

  • Check out the Books documentation to learn how to create and edit Quarto Books.

Quarto Markdown

  • You can format text using Markdown. Markdown is a “mark-up” language, like HTML and LaTeX.

  • It is designed to be simple but very efficient and extensible.

Follow DEMO.

Self-study

  • Markdown Tutorial to learn markdown interactively in your browser.

  • Markdown Basics from the Quarto documentation. The “Authoring” pages of the Quarto documentation covers all your writing needs.

Figures, tables and cross-references

![My figure caption](my-figure.png){#fig-my-figure}

See @fig-my-figure.

Figures, tables and cross-references

See @tbl-fruit for a list of prices.

| fruit  | price  |
|--------|--------|
| apple  | 2.05   |
| pear   | 1.37   |
| orange | 3.09   |

: Fruit prices {#tbl-fruit}

Section cross-references

# Introduction {#sec-introduction}

# Methods {#sec-methods}

As mentioned in @sec-introduction.

The ID doesn’t have to match the title.

# Background {#sec-introduction}

# Methods {#sec-methods}

As mentioned in @sec-introduction.

Render to PDF

  • You need a LaTeX distribution.

  • Install with quarto install tinytex in the “Terminal” in VS Code.

Follow DEMO.

Citations and bibliography

  • You list your entries in a .bib file (it uses BibTeX syntax) and refer to the entries by their id in your text.

  • You can automatically add entries to the .bib file from Zotero if you use Visual Editor.

Follow DEMO.

Self-study

Summary

  • Quarto is a publishing system based on Markdown.

  • You can render Quarto files into many formants thanks to pandoc: HTML, PDF, MS Word are just a few.

  • Quarto supports scholarly writing: figures, tables, cross-references and citations.

  • You can write dissertation/theses using a Quarto Book project.

  • Check out the Quarto website for more information and documentation.