Write Once, Publish Everywhere: Quarto Markdown for Digital Publishing

Markdown has quietly become one of the most popular writing formats in research, teaching, and digital publishing, for good reasons. The open-source standard is simple, portable, and future-friendly. You can write once in clean, readable plain text and publish anywhere in a variety of outputs, without getting stuck in formatting chaos. From lab notes to literature reviews, Markdown helps writers focus on ideas first, then turn those ideas into professional-looking outputs.

 

In this one-hour, hands-on workshop, we’ll take Markdown a step further with Quarto, an enhanced publishing system built on Markdown that makes it easy to create scholarly papers, PDFs, ebooks (EPUB), websites, blogs, and presentation slides from a single source file. Quarto adds powerful features like citations and bibliographies (working with reference management software such as Zotero), cross-references for figures/tables, code + data outputs (great for reproducible research), templates, and multi-format publishing workflows—without requiring you to be a programmer.

 

Designed for college faculty and students across natural science, sociology, psychology, communications, digital humanities, etc., this session will include practical demos and starter files you can reuse for your own projects. Bring a laptop if you’d like to follow along and leave with a workflow that makes writing, editing, and publishing faster, cleaner, and more consistent across formats. A setup guide will be distributed before the workshop.