Earlier this month, @idavydov filed an issue against Quarto reporting that it is about 100x slower than rmarkdown for documents with long output. The minimal reprex was striking:

cat(strrep("x\n", 100000))

Running quarto render on a document with that single chunk took 35 seconds. The equivalent rmarkdown::render() finished in under half a second. As a side note in the issue, the reporter pinged me …

Last month, @bastistician opened an issue on the litedown repo pointing out that knitr has a hook_pngquant() function for compressing PNG plots from code chunks, but litedown lacks such a feature. He included a reasonable workaround—calling system2("pngquant", …) with litedown::get_context("plot_files") in a chunk at the end of the vignette. It shrank his vignette from 80 KB …