How to Make High Quality PDFs with Quarto and Typst

Learn how to create beautifully designed PDF reports in Quarto using Typst templates. In this walkthrough, we go from the default Quarto PDF output to fully customized layouts with brand fonts, heading styles, color accents, footers, grids, status boxes, and more — all using Typst template partials. This demo uses real report examples from our work with the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center.

You can find all of the code in the corresponding blog post at: https://rfortherestofus.com/2025/11/t...

If you’d like help building custom report templates or improving your organization’s reporting workflow, visit claritydatastudio.com.

Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:29 - Why Typst for PDFs? Example report overview
01:26 - Default Quarto PDF vs Typst PDF
02:04 - Making quick PDF style changes in YAML
03:03 - Using brand.yml for basic styling
04:37 - Moving beyond brand.yml → Custom Typst template
05:44 - Connecting Quarto variables to Typst (typst-show)
06:31 - Creating the Typst template file
07:23 - Setting page size & margins
08:44 - Setting default text styles
09:45 - Customizing heading styles
10:36 - Styling heading levels differently
13:26 - Adding a custom footer
15:33 - Fixing spacing + date formatting
16:58 - Adding logo, title, and flag (cover layout)
19:48 - Adding decorative blue line rule
20:42 - Using blue line from inside Quarto
21:44 - Creating “source text” helper function
22:46 - Creating styled status boxes
24:49 - Using HTML/CSS for background highlight sections
25:33 - Creating multi-column layouts
26:14 - Tip: Typst extensions in Positron
28:00 - Outro