The Beginner’s Guide to Markdown and Pandoc

Abstract

Markdown is a markup language. The name is a pun, but where the humor might be atrocious, the language is not. The Markdown language lets you write plain text documents with a few lightweight annotations that specify how you want the document formatted. Such annotations are the defining characteristics of a markup language. Markup languages separate the semantic or content part of a document from the formatting of said document. The content of a document is the text, what should be headers, what should be emphasized, and so on. The formatting specifies the font and font size, whether headers should be numbered, and so on.