The Programming Historian (Mar 2014)

Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown

  • Dennis Tenen,
  • Grant Wythoff

Abstract

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In this tutorial, you will first learn the basics of Markdown—an easy to read and write markup syntax for plain text—as well as Pandoc, a command line tool that converts plain text into a number of beautifully formatted file types: PDF, .docx, HTML, LaTeX, slide decks, and more.1 With Pandoc as your digital typesetting tool, you can use Markdown syntax to add figures, a bibliography, formatting, and easily change citation styles from Chicago to MLA (for instance), all using plain text.

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