Simple Article Template for Quarto

This is a Quarto template that assists you in creating in simple, journal article-like document. The template allows both single and two-column output.

Creating a New Article

You can use this as a template to create a document by using the following command:

quarto use template cmarquardt/quarto-simple-article

This will install the extension and create an example .qmd file, along with a bibiography.bib file that you can use as a starting place for your article.

Installation For An Existing Document

You may also use this format with an existing Quarto project or document. From the Quarto project or document directory, run the following command to install this format:

quarto install extension cmarquardt/quarto-simple-article

Usage

To use the format, you can use the format names simple-article-pdf and simple-article-html. For example:

quarto render article.qmd --to simple-article-pdf

or in your document yaml

format:
  pdf: default
  simple-article-pdf:
    keep-tex: true

You can view a preview of the rendered template at https://cmarquardt.github.io/quarto-simple-article/.

Format Options

The simple article format supports a number of options for customizing the format and appearance of the document. Specify these under the classoption key.

twoside - use two-sided output.
twocolumn - use two-coloumn output; this option should be used together should be used together with a reduced font size (and possibly narrower margins).
9pt, 11pt,... - font size for normal text; 9pt is useful for twocolumn output while other font sizes supported by the extsizes package will also work (default: 10pt).
narrowmargins - use narrow margins; possibly useful for twocolumn articles.
normalnumbers - use normal numbers for sectioning (default are roman numbers).
lucida - use the commercially available (from the TUG) Lucida fonts; this requires Lua/XeLaTeX (default: Palatino for pdfLaTeX or TeX Gyre Pagella for Lua/XeLaTeX).
phfthm - provide theorem and proof environments from the phfthm package.

For two-column output, I also recommend non-indented paragraphs (use the ìndent` parameter for the output format). An example:

format:
  simple-article-pdf:
    indent: false
    classoption: 
     - 9pt
     - lucida
     - twocolumn
     - twoside

Limitations

In two-column mode, markdown tables are not supported. The reason is that Quarto (at least at the time of writing these notes in v1.2.x) uses the longtable environment to typeset tables which is incompatible with the twocolumn option to LaTeX classes. Unfortunately, the use of longtable is currently hard coded in Quarto.

A workaround - for short tables - is to use the knitr::kable() or kableExtra::kbl() table generators in R which do not rely on longtable. By using their table.envir argument (or it's abbreviated form table.env), even tables spanning both columns can be constructed.

The draw with this approach is that table captions and labels must be provided through the caption and label arguments of these functions; using the Quarto-typical comment-like entries in a code cell (e.g., label: and tbl-cap:) do not work as their values are not fed into the kable or kbl() calls. An example for creating a full-width table is:

kableExtra::kbl(head(mtcars), caption = "Cars", label = "tab-cars", booktabs = TRUE, table.env = 'table*')

The same code without using table.envir will generate a single column table.

cmarquardt / quarto-simple-article