You Should Learn Markdown

This is a quick article about why you should learn markdown.

What is markdown

Markdown is a “mark-up” language. It allows you to write content in plain text that can be easily converted to other formats, such as html, pdf, docx, and many more. All the articles written on this website are written in markdown, here’s an image of this article written in markdown.

The reason you should learn markdown is that it allows you to focus on the content / text of your content with simple concepts for formatting. Markdown is used heavily in documenting software projects, which is how I got introduced to it, however it can scale all the way up to writing research papers or even books.

I use markdown for probably 80% of all the text documents I need to write, from company documents, web / software documentation, and so on. It allows me to get content out quickly without having to click around with formatting options in a program like Word or Pages. To be clear, a lot of the reports and things I generate for my Home Performance Assessments are written using Pages (for now at least) because I have templates that make the documents look more professional, however I am working on solutions to migrate those to be markdown based.

Markdown is supported in mostly all the Google tools, as well as the Outlook email client (which is one of my least favorite tools, BTW). It makes it simple to create tables, lists, and many common document related tasks.

Resources

You can learn more about the syntax used for markdown at markdownguide.org .

A non-exhaustive list of where you can use Markdown and editors.

You can use tools such as pandoc to convert Markdown files to other formats.

Conclusion

I hope that you take the time to research and see if Markdown is good fit for your document / content creation.

Thanks for reading until the end!