Is anyone able to give an outline on how bookdown is likely to evolve as quarto becomes more preferred?
For example:
Will bookdown become irrelevant to quarto projects because the bookdown functionality is in quarto?
Will there be tools to port existing bookdown projects to quarto?
Quarto also has me quite concerned/excited for the same reason.
ICYMI here is a statement from the quarto (and Rmarkdown) developers on the broad positioning of quarto relative to Rmarkdown: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions/463
Hi,
I'll try to give more insights in addition to the link you share.
As you deduced, there is a direct relationship between bookdown and Quarto book, and a rightful question about bookdown future.
One thing for sure is that both will live together and Quarto book will not replace bookdown. Quarto book is already having more features available, including all (almost) all the ones from bookdown.
Quarto Book has been developed based on the experience of bookdown but benefit of a from scratch rewrite, better integration with Pandoc features, and better project organization features. However, this does not make bookdown obselete - It brings bookdown concept and logic to other users outside of the R world, and R users can benefit from this too.
This means that we will continue development on bookdown with bug fixes and smaller enhancement from us, or from PR by the community. However, major new features will probably be only available in Quarto books (like new formats e.g HTML5 books, or specific feature e.g tufte or distill like layout).
So no, bookdown will not become irrelevant even if Quarto Book has most of the features. It is just that for new book project, we would recommend having a look at Quarto Book first as we believe the experience could be better, especially if not only R code chunks content are involved.
For those having already a book built with bookdown, we are thinking of offering some migration tools to make the switch if desired, in the aim to make that as easy as possible, with as guidance as possible. For example, when starting a new edition of the book we think this could be of interest. So yes, there will be tools to port existing bookdown project to Quarto.
But bookdown is not going away for R users and there is no incentive to change right now.
I hope this give useful addition and we are always welcoming more feedbacks and dicussions with the community, so please do not hesitate to ask and give your opinions.
Thank you !
Hello!
Thank you for the great explanation. Does this also apply to blogdown? Will Quatro be the go to for blogdown?
I currently have a website built with blogdown, so I'm just curious.
Thanks!
blogdown is a R package using Hugo as default for website generator. it allows you to have a workflow from Rmd to HTML to be processed by Hugo, but also from Rmd to md to be processed by Hugo md processor directly. Quarto won't be running Hugo at all in the process, but with the latter workflow, Quarto can be used to produced md documents for Hugo (Quarto – Hugo).
blogdown is one option do create websites with R which uses Hugo. You can also do it only with R using R Markdown websites, or distill for examples. Quarto websites is another option to create websites and blogs without Hugo.
So at the end, if you are happy with how blogdown works and happy with what Hugo has to offer then no need to change your website. blogdown won't go away, it offers something in additon of what Quarto is doing. Quarto won't do what Hugo is doing and won't replace that. There is just a workflow possible using Quarto for already Hugo users, mainly non-R user who are not using blogdown.
Hope it helps
I understand the focus on code, whether R or other languages, but let me just say that I don’t have code in my books at all. None.
I simply love bookdown because it is a simple way to produce web, ePub, mobi, and PDF versions all at once of a regular book, while giving me the flexibility to style them how I want.
And importantly, the web version is already styled and fully functional, including search, not an afterthought.
Just great software. Great job.
Is there a place I can bookmark that will list the remaining bookdown features or functionality that are not in Quarto? Or just differences?
That is great ! Our tools are also there for non code usage to offer a nice user experience around Pandoc using markdown as input.
Not there is not a one one comparison between the two. I think all the special features of bookdown are already in Quarto, and more new feature. However, book format is different - you won't have exact gitbook(), nor bs4_book() but Quarto book is based on Bootstrap 5 by default, so offers an other format.
Best thing to do is looking at Gallery (Quarto – Gallery) and the guide (Quarto – Guide) for authoring features and also how book project works.
If you are happy with how bookdown works and how its format looks, then there is really no need to make a switch.
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