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Plain text is the most open, accessible format you can choose to write in. At the end of the day, a plain text file can always be opened on a computer. However, plain text itself is not much fun to read. Enter markdown. In a plain text editor or dedicated markdown editor, you can mark up your text to indicate what should be a header, bold, italic etc. You can then send your plain text document to pdf, html and other document formats. You can even create presentation slides.
For this activity, use Dillinger, on online markdown editing application to create a markdown document.
Note Basic markdown syntax is that same across most editors, so most any guide you come across should work, but occasionally you’ll see reference to particular platforms or flavours, like GitHub Flavoured Markdown.
Read a bit more about Markdown: https://www.markdownguide.org/getting-started/
Take a tutorial: https://www.markdowntutorial.com/
Keep a cheat sheet: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet
Dig deeper and read about Pandoc, the engine that fuels the conversion of document types https://pandoc.org/index.html
Complete this Activity
After you have completed this activity, please briefly share your experience with Dilinger and Markdown below. Thinking back to what you have learned in the Open Research unit, what do you think the benefits of markdown could be for your work?
Image Credit: Image used on featured image untitled by Markus Spiske (cc 0)