Publishing a Quarto Document

Learn how to publish Quarto: render to HTML, PDF and Word, and put your work online with Quarto Pub, GitHub Pages or Netlify. A practical guide to shipping your report.

You’ve written the report — now get it to your audience. Quarto renders to every common document format and publishes to the web with a single command.

Rendering to a file

From the terminal, one command builds the output listed in your YAML format:

quarto render report.qmd

In RStudio, the Render button does the same. To target a specific format on the fly:

quarto render report.qmd --to pdf
quarto render report.qmd --to docx

A note on formats: HTML works out of the box. Word (docx) needs nothing extra and is ideal when a client wants to edit. PDF needs a LaTeX engine — the easiest route is a one-time quarto install tinytex, or skip LaTeX entirely and use the Typst engine (format: typst).

Publishing to the web

Quarto has a built-in publish command. The quickest is Quarto Pub (free hosting for documents and sites):

quarto publish quarto-pub report.qmd

Other one-command targets include GitHub Pages (quarto publish gh-pages) and Netlify (quarto publish netlify). Quarto pushes the rendered output and gives you a live URL.

Building a whole website

A folder of .qmd files plus a _quarto.yml project file becomes a website — navigation, search and theming included. That’s exactly how the site you’re reading is built. Walk through it in build a website with Quarto.

Where to go next

You now have the whole workflow: write in Markdown, run code chunks, configure the YAML header, cross-reference your outputs, parameterise for scale, and publish. From here, the blog goes deeper on each piece.


Need a reporting pipeline your team can run on demand — reproducible, branded, one command from data to document? That’s what we build.