Resources

Markdown Tutorials

• CommonMark Markdown in 60 seconds or 10 minute Markdown Tutorial
• Markdown Guide
• Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown

Markdown Reference

• GitHub markdown flavor (can be used any where on GitHub)
• Markdown (original spec Daring Fireball / John Gruber)
• CommonMark
• kramdown (the Ruby markdown parser used by Jekyll)

Markdown Tools

• Text editors: you don’t need a fancy tool! Markdown can be written by any text editor. For basic writing, Windows Notepad++, Mac TextEdit, or Linux Gedit are sufficient. For larger projects or notes, a more complete code editor might be helpful such as Visual Studio Code.
• Web app editors:
  • Dillinger (sync with cloud services, collaborate, comments, LaTeX Math, UML diagrams, ABC notation for music)
  • StackEdit (sync with cloud services, collaborate, comments, LaTeX Math, UML diagrams, ABC notation for music)
  • HackMD Markdown realtime collaboration platform (self-hosted open source version CodiMD)
• Publishing workflows: Manubot, Quarto
• Note taking: Obsidian, Notable, Simplenote, Standardnotes, Joplin
• Visual editors: stand alone desktop apps with familiar GUI interface and builtin output options
  • Zettlr (academic oriented, with Zotero support, spellcheck)
  • ghostwriter, Typora (oriented towards writers)
• Libraries: the Demo editor uses markdown-it library to render Markdown using JS.

Accessibility

LaTeX and Pandoc:

• Pandoc Accessible PDFs and PDF archiving standards
• An introduction to tagged PDF files: internals and the challenges of accessibility, Overleaf
• LaTeX articles about PDF Accessibility (improved accessibility is a focus for the LaTeX3 project, the next version of LaTeX)

Homework and LMS:

• Making Homework Write-up Accessible (essentially, use Pandoc to create HTML rather than PDFs), University of Washington
• Using Pandoc to Convert LaTeX to HTML and MathML, University of South Carolina
• LaTeX Accessibility Guide, OSU Engineering
• Creating Accessible LaTeX Documents, GVSU Library

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Install Pandoc

Pandoc is a command line utility to translate between many formats and generate new output versions, such as PDFs (via LaTeX).

To create PDFs from Markdown, you will need Pandoc plus a LaTeX distribution. Check the Installing Pandoc guide for full details. Here is the suggested method:

• Pandoc with GitHub Actions