November 16, 2025
Docs vs Decks: The Showdown
Writing a Data Science Book with Quarto (Using Jupyter Notebooks or Pandoc)
Quarto makes book-building look easy—but teachers want slides that do more
TLDR: Stephen Turner rebuilt a full course site as an e‑book using Quarto, which converts one file to many formats. Readers cheered the simplicity, but teachers pushed back, saying Quarto slide decks lack classroom must‑haves like image tools and animations—fueling a books‑vs‑slides showdown.
Stephen Turner just turned his old data science course into a slick e‑book with Quarto, the “write once, publish everywhere” tool. He says the old RMarkdown (plain text mixing writing and code) just worked with tiny tweaks. Read it here. Quarto even embeds interactive code you can run in the page. Books, blogs, slides, PDFs—Quarto flaunts them all. It grew out of the R community and now plays nice with Python too.
Then the comments lit up. Teacher somethingsome tried Quarto + reveal.js (web slide decks) and hit a wall: fine for quick pitches, not for real lectures. Missing basics like background removal, easy cropping, arrows, and smooth animations? That’s a hard no. Fans gush “it just works,” instructors clap back: “try teaching a semester with it.” That sparked a familiar debate: slides vs scripts.
Memes flew: one‑doc‑to‑rule‑them‑all vs PowerPoint supremacy. Some cheer that Quarto nails books and blogs. Others wave the whiteboard, joking that hand‑drawn arrows beat any code‑driven deck. The drama: publishing paradise meets classroom chaos. Quarto shines for making polished books; teachers want fewer hoops and features built for live teaching. Verdict from the thread: great for publishing, still auditioning for the classroom.
Key Points
- •Quarto enables single-source documents to render into multiple formats including HTML, PDF, Word, presentations, dashboards, websites, books, and blogs.
- •The author converted an existing RMarkdown-based course website into a Quarto e-book with minimal changes.
- •Quarto supports interactive R and Python code blocks via WebAssembly and works natively with Python, R, and OJS.
- •Documentation for Quarto books involves organizing qmd files and specifying them in a _quarto.yml file.
- •Quarto’s ecosystem includes manuscripts, dashboards, and evolving journal article templates, with examples like an arXiv template.