# Quarto

27 Hacker News commenters recommended Quarto and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for turning Markdown and code into documents, websites, slides and books, but critics say it still has rough edges.

## Why people recommend it

- Renders many output formats from one source (6 comments): "This is why Quarto (based on pandoc) is a better choice if you need both online and offline rendered documentation/text" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46363283)) "One nice thing about Quarto, is that I could have different fonts and formatting niceties for the epub vs PDF version" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945660)) "You write Markdown files with code blocks, and they're rendered into nice looking documents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45820799))
- Easy to use for analysis work (5 comments): "It works well for this analysis style work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48190082)) "nowadays this is very easy with Quarto" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46051385)) "it's been quite easy to use so far" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460777))
- Runs Jupyter and other language code (4 comments): "Python, R, Observable JS, Julia, bash, or any language with Jupyter kernel, all natively supported" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48386967)) "It supports both code execution via Jupyter, and output via Typst" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345858)) "quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923174))
- Built on pandoc with strong extensions (4 comments): "This is why Quarto (based on pandoc) is a better choice if you need both online and offline rendered documentation/text" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46363283)) "I don't see anything here that would make me move away from pandoc/quarto" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181511)) "Uses pandoc under the hood, has support for latex and many more niceties." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270152))

## What people warn about

- Rough edges and occasional problems (2 comments): "Quarto is better for documents, but still has rough edges." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45944473)) "I like quarto with ipynb myself (though it's not without occasionally infuriating problems)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987665))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Typst](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typst.md): 205 recommend
- [LaTeX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/latex.md): 137 recommend
- [TeX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tex.md): 27 recommend
- [TeXmacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-texmacs.md): 19 recommend
- [TeX Live](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tex-live.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Quarto", https://hackerapproved.com/p/quarto/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).