even back when this was just known as RNotebooks this was a great system for producing executable reports that did not warrant the complications of a full latex setup. it’s only gotten better since
The latest version has Typst support and allow producing pdf files much faster than any LateX distribution. Even with a complex template it compiles almost instantly and you can see the final pdf changing while you are typing.
(disclosure: I work on Quarto) I 100% agree with you. It's partly why tools from the Quarto lineage (knitr, rmarkdown) work hard to make popular latex features like crossreferences work in HTML and other forward-facing formats. At the same time, if you haven't tried Typst, my opinion is that doing so is an afternoon well spent. It's an impressive system even early in its development stage. I'm hoping it finally displaces LaTeX --- and I'm a former academic having written about a hundred papers in LaTeX!
I have high hopes for Typst, but I'm very disappointed they didn't design for accessibility from the start (and nice HTML would have done the job). It's shocking how inaccessible latex's output is, and yet Typst manages to be even worse!
Quarto's html output on the other hand is generally lovely for accessible output.
Quarto is pretty different from Rmarkdown because it doesn't require an R runtime. This opens up a lot of possibilities when you don't want to include the R dependency.
