[Proposal] Quarto extension for JuliaCon Proceedings

[pat-alt]

Hi there,

I've been working on a Quarto extension for JuliaCon Proceedings: https://github.com/pat-alt/quarto-juliacon-proceedings. It is built on top of the LaTeX class contained in this repo (though with minor edits to the cls file, tracked here). It needs some more work but could eventually enable authors to write the proceedings articles in Quarto with ease. The repo contains more information including links to examples that can be used to spot any remaining discrepancies.

What is Quarto?

Quarto makes it easy to write reproducible documents that can be rendered to PDF, HTML, Word and more. It is based on Markdown, which is easy to learn and write. It also supports LaTeX, which is useful for more advanced formatting. As this extension demonstrates, Quarto is also very flexible and can be extended with custom templates and styles.

Why Quarto?

By embracing Quarto, JuliaCon Proceedings can set an example for how to write reproducible documents. We would not only make it easier for authors to write their submissions but also open the door for more advanced features such as interactive figures and executable code blocks in HTML documents.

Note

Some of the examples contained in the repo also include HTML versions. Those are still in default format but should provide a good idea of what is possible.

The template discusses some further advantages: pdf, html.

Remaining Discrepancies

There are some remaining discrepancies. I've opened issues for all of the discrepancies that I have discovered so far. The rendered PDF of my recent JuliaCon publication serves as a comparison to the published version. If you spot any differences not currently listed in issues, please open a new issue.

BTW, this is what a corresponding HTML version of a JuliaCon Proceedings paper could look like.

Help appreciated

I not very good with LaTex, so if this proposal is of interest, I'd much appreciate your support with this 😅

Any thoughts/questions welcome!

[lucaferranti]

@pat-alt, we chatted at JuliaCon briefly about suppporting quarto, I did a bit of homework and infra-wise this is possible.

A couple of first pointers to get started:

1. I noticed in your template the paper.yml disappeared. That is unfortunately needed by the proceedings bot to generate matadata. Is it possible to change the template to e.g. keep the paper.yml and e.g. have a preprocessing script to add the metadata where quarto wants them? See e.g. the prep.rb script used in the current template.

2. The app uses github actions hence all we need is really an action that spits a paper.pdf file. This should really be all we need (but I tend to be overoptimistic :) )

Then, we will need to extend the current action to "dispatch on the file type", i.e. paper.tex -> use current action, paper.qml -> use quarto action. (working on this already, hopefully ready soon :) )

[pat-alt]

Hi! I'm on vacation for the next two weeks still, but will get back to this when I'm back. Thanks for having a look at this 😃