Add comparison with quarto to background page

[joelostblom]

The info on the background page was helpful for me to understand the differences between mystjs, jupyterbook, and sphinx (both technically and with the specific recommendations on which tool could be used for which purpose). I think it would be really helpful to add information on quarto in that page so that it is easier to understand how mystjs is different from quarto in terms of scope, technical capabilities, and intended use cases. This would help when deciding which tool to choose for which job.

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[wolfoo2931]

I would also love to read the difference to pandoc

From what I see:

• more open licence: GPL vs MIT
• Runs in browser if you do not have to create PDFs? So docx and creation of plain latex file would be possible?

[riziles]

I have a fair amount of experience with both. When I have some time, I will put together a more formal summary, but here are some high level observations:

• It's actually not too hard to create a project that's relatively compatible with both, and I have done this on quite a few occasions. There are some annoying syntax differences, but it's pretty easy to add both types of cell-tags and YAML matter to a notebook or markdown file.
• Quarto supports more output formats (Reveal.js, Docusaurus, PowerPoint, etc). I also find that the .docx output from Quarto is superior. That's actually what forced me to use it for the first time.
• I don't have much experience with it, but MyST-JS appears to support many more scientific journal formats than Quarto.
• The fact that JupyterBook is built on Sphinx is a BIG advantage because you can easily add Sphinx autodoc pages if you need to.
• MyST-JS and JupyterBook formats play much nicer with JupyText, which is important to me. Quarto one time royally screwed me by overwriting changes in a notebook because it doesn't round trip correctly.
• The Quarto VS Code plugin is pretty awesome and worth installing even if you're not building a Quarto project.
• In my experience, it's easier to build visualizations that are compatible with multiple output formats with MyST-JS and JupyterBook.
• The underlying architecture is very different, but JupyterBook, MyST-JS and Quarto are all relatively easy to setup and install.
• The license is a big deal if you are using for commercial purposes or integrating into a bigger project. MyST/JupyterBook is the clear winner here.