Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without the unwavering support of Donald Knuth’s writings ; the book (Knuth 1984) has accompanied generations of doctoral students through long nights debugging their LaTeX code. I also thank Leslie Lamport for making TeX accessible to ordinary mortals with LaTeX (Lamport 1994), and the Quarto team — J.J. Allaire, Charles Teague, Carlos Scheidegger, Yihui Xie, and Charles Dervieux — for making reproducible scientific publishing a reality (Allaire et al. 2022).
My thanks go to my virtual doctoral supervisor, Abbé Henri Grégoire, whose 1794 vision — bringing the arts and crafts within everyone’s reach — resonates with the ideals of free software. I doubt he anticipated PDF/A-1b, but the spirit is there.
I thank the members of the virtual jury for their time and availability, in particular M. Vaucanson, whose expertise in mechanical automata proved more relevant than it might seem for understanding the pdflatex compilation pipeline and the magic behind Pandoc and Lua filters.
Finally, a heartfelt thought for all doctoral students at the Cnam and elsewhere who have opened a poorly constructed .tex template file for the first time and wondered why they had one too many left braces. This guide is for you: thanks to Quarto, writing becomes as simple as Markdown, yet with almost unlimited possibilities, and the elegance of generating the same document in multiple output formats through a modern approach.