Quarto has a lot of features spread across a lot of documentation pages. Finding the one option you need often means already knowing which page it lives on, which is fine once you know, and useless when you do not.
So I started building a set of visual cheatsheets covering the major areas of Quarto authoring, from column layouts and callout blocks to table syntax and figure cross-references.
Browse all the Quarto cheatsheets
The Idea
Quarto’s syntax is mostly about how markup maps to rendered output, and that mapping is easier to show than to describe. Each cheatsheet uses hand-drawn SVG diagrams that put the source and the result side by side, so you can see what .column-margin does rather than read a sentence about it.
The diagrams follow Bootstrap’s default color palette, so they match what most Quarto documents look like out of the box. Every one comes in paired light and dark variants that switch automatically with your theme, and each post collects all of its diagrams into a single composite image you can download, print, or embed in your own materials.
Available Now
- Layout, covering column widths, directional variants, margin content, grid customization, and page layout modes.
- Callout Blocks, covering the five callout types, appearance variants, collapsible and titled forms, and cross-references.
- Figures and Cross-References, covering image syntax, subfigure layouts, code cell figure options, and cross-reference prefixes.
- Tables, covering pipe, grid, and list table syntax, alignment, captions, and code cell tables.
In Progress
More cheatsheets are drafted and will appear on the index as they are finished:
- Code Blocks and Annotations: execution options, display settings, annotation syntax.
- Revealjs Presentations: slide structure, column layouts, backgrounds, themes.
- Dashboards: layout, cards, value boxes, tabsets, navigation.
- Website Navigation: navbar, sidebar, footer, breadcrumbs, page navigation.
- Scholarly Writing: citations, cross-references, appendices, theorem environments.
- Diagrams: Mermaid and Graphviz (DOT) diagrams.
- Theming and Brand: Bootswatch themes, SCSS customization, dark mode.
- Books: project structure, chapter organization, multi-format output.
- Publishing: deploy targets (GitHub Pages, Netlify, Quarto Pub), CI/CD.
- Conditional Content: content-visible and content-hidden, format and metadata conditions.
For the full Quarto documentation, visit quarto.org.
See Also
The same treatment, applied to the Python ecosystem: Python Cheatsheets, One Diagram Per Command.