I’ve become writing with markdown fan. On surface level it doesn’t seem like anything special - just a simple text file. Really - you can open in even the simplest text editor (no matter it recognizes .md extension). But there’s a weird thing that’s hard to overlook - weird characters in some places, for examples hashes ("#") near the chapter titles.

That’s part of the secret sauce behind this format. Application dedicated to markdown editing will display those sections with appropriate style - chapter titles as chapter titles / headers (h1, h2, h3..). You can set the style either by clicking a button in the interface, or by adding those extra characters - which quickly becomes second nature. You’re able to smoothly, efficiently write without your hands moving away from the keyboard.

One of the initial “gotchas” is lack of the direct tools for setting indentation, margins etc. But hold on - it just works differently. In fact I think it’s another virtue of markdown - let me explain. I came to a conclusion that the way I’ve been taught howto work on documents (and the way it’s being presented in most schools) is fundamentally wrong.The writing part has been merged with crude desktop publishing options and layout design. That’s the way it works in Word, LibreOffice, GoogleDocs and so on. This often ends up badly, with users spending lots of time on layouts, then fixing styling, font sizes etc. each time those break - instead of actually creating content. If you don’t spend this extra time you end up with ugly, messy document (or even worse, a document where automatic table of contents generation etc. won’t work).

When you work in markdown you focus on content creation. The way your text is rendered is handled by style file that you choose (or which is being used by the app of your choice). Which means you don’t worry about those things altogether - you get the distraction free, fluid workflow and the resulting document looks coherent. The app consistently applies the style for you. It has an extra bonus in store as well - when you want to get a different look, you just pick different style file (or you can create your own).

Here’s a sample of raw markdown and resulting rendered doc:

Often markdown is being used without people realizing it - for example most popular note takign apps (Obsidian, Joplin, Notes…) uses this format. It’s also very common in CMS-s.

Pandoc

On of the main benefits of using markdown is ease of turning it into something different - you can easily make it a pdf, html, doc etc. That’s the benefit behind the articles on this blog - I create those in markdown editor of choice (currently Joplin), save those in specific folder picked up by Hugo (static site generator) which takes care of creating a sensible html site from this input.

Picking up a tool like Pandoc allows to venture outside html - it will handle pdf, doc creation among others. It will also take care of proper navigation, table of contents, text below images, citations.

This free app really supercharges what can be done with markdown. By default it does not have any sort of graphical interace (it’s a command line app), but luckily some gui wrappers exist for those who don’t want to use terminal.

A most basic command that would turn markdown to pdf can look like this:

pandoc inputfile.md -o outputfile.pdf

• this will take inputfile.md and will create pdf named outputfile.pdf

More advanced version can be more akin to:

pandoc -s --bibliography mybiblography.bib --citeproc --toc --csl chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl input.md -o output.pdf -V lang=pl

• in this example pandoc will read input.md, will take into account bibliography stored in mybiblography.bib (from Zotero etc.) and citation style defined in chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl, finally creating output.pdf making sure language is set to Polish.

Which btw shows that when you work in markdown you can easily pair it with reference managers and citation styles. Which I’m quite sure counts like a huge pluse for those that even once heard that they need to change citation styles in the document they’ve just finished writing. In the example above you’d just change chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl to other citation style (harvard etc.) and call it a day.

Git

One of the less obvious benefits directly connected to the fact that markdown is “just” a text file comes with git usage. If we use this system we get a full change history and ability to create variants, roll back changes and so on - and it’s doable even months after the fact.

Formats that on surface level are not text, but binary completely lack this benefit - git becomes just a version storage option.

You get even more by using Github / Gitlub or your own remote repo - apart from version control, you get a sort of backup in the cloud, turning it into supercharged Dropbox / GoogleDrive / Onedrive.

That being said this particular part might not be for everyone - version control systems are usually created with programmers in mind. But for those that need an extra layer of protection and way to monitor changes it’s something definitely worth the effort.

Links.

https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/

https://pandoc.org/

Sample markdown editors / note taking apps:

https://joplinapp.org/

https://obsidian.md/

https://www.zettlr.com/

https://typora.io/