About refloraR

Open source tools for scientific and technical publishing

Goals

The overarching goal of Quarto is to make the process of creating and collaborating on scientific and technical documents dramatically better. We hope to do this in several dimensions:

  • Create a writing and publishing environment with great integrated tools for technical content. We want to make authoring with embedded code, equations, figures, complex diagrams, interactive widgets, citations, cross references, and the myriad other special requirements of scientific discourse straightforward and productive for everyone.

  • Help authors take full advantage of the web as a connected, interactive platform for communications, while still providing the ability to create excellent printed output from the same document source. Researchers shouldn’t need to choose between LaTeX, MS Word, and HTML but rather be able to author documents that target all of them at the same time.

  • Make reproducible research and publications the norm rather than the exception. Reproducibility requires that the code and data required to create a manuscript are an integrated part of it. However, this isn’t often straightforward in practice—Quarto aims to make it easier to adopt a reproducible workflow than not.

refloraR is open source software. We believe that it’s better for everyone if the tools used for research and science are free and open. Reproducibility, widespread sharing of knowledge and techniques, and the leveling of the playing field by eliminating cost barriers are but a few of the shared benefits of free software in science.

Project

At the core of Quarto is Pandoc, a powerful and flexible document processing tool. Quarto adds a number of facilities to Pandoc aimed at scientific and technical publishing, including:

  1. Embedding code and output from Python, R, and JavaScript via integration with Jupyter, Knitr, and Observable.

  2. A variety of extensions to Pandoc markdown useful for technical writing including cross-references, sub-figures, layout panels, hoverable citations and footnotes, callouts, and more.

Development of refloraR is sponsored by Posit, PBC, where we previously created a similar system (R Markdown) that shared the same goals, but was targeted principally at users of the R language. The same core team works on both Quarto and R Markdown:

With refloraR, we are hoping to bring these tools to a much wider audience.

Contribute

You can contribute to refloraR in many ways:

  • By opening issues to provide feedback and share ideas.
  • By submitting Pull Request to fix opened issues
  • By submitting Pull Request to suggest new features (it is considered good practice to open an issue for discussion before working on a pull request for a new feature).