Markdown

If you want some great documentation on Markdown, see the excellent Markdown guide here. There are also several free online editors you can use to play around with Markdown, Dillinger is one of best.

Quarto

Quarto is the next generation of R Markdown, being made by some of same developers. The Quarto website has some really nice documentation, so I’d recommend checking it out.

The intention appears to be to move away from a dependence on R itself, and make the framework more language agnostic. The main differences I’ve noticed thus far and small changes to YAML keys, a different chunk option style (though it appears to be backwards compatible) and a neat Div and Span system for controlling some more fancy formatting options in a universal manner.

The developers currently seem to intend on maintaining R Markdown, but will likely only be adding any new features to Quarto moving forward.

I like what I’ve seen from my initial experimentation, and I’d probably suggest newcomers may wish to just focus on Quarto rather than R Markdown itself.

It should be noted that Quarto is pretty young, and some functionality possible in R Markdown isn’t functional in Quarto yet (a good example here), but the devs seem to working well to get to full feature parity in the nearish future.

The recent RStudio conf had a nice workshop on Quarto that was recorded:

Zotero

Here are a couple of guides to setting up Zotero to play nicely with R Markdown: