Explaining Markdown and Pandoc to Normal People

Explaining Markdown and Pandoc to Normal People

[BP Jonsson]

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I mentioned Markdown and Pandoc in the comment section of a Quora answer
dealing with the ancient practice of typing two spaces after a sentence.
The author of the answer, who apparently is an editor but not a
(computer) nerd asked me what Pandoc/Markdown are. My reply (which if I
may say so is a rather succinct explanation aimed at Normal People) is
below. Feel free to use it as/if you like (as in: I hereby place it in
the public domain to the extent that that is possible in my
juridiction!)

****

Short answer: things computer nerds prefer over word processors.

Long (and totally nerdy! 😁) answer:

Markdown is a somewhat varying set of markup conventions for
representing things like headings, boldface, italics, lists and the like
in plaintext (think Notepad) using punctuation characters.

Computer nerds like me prefer plaintext because it has been around since
forever, is still going strong, is maximally portable and can be opened
and edited by many different editing programs on any platform (like
Windows, Mac, Linux and other obscure/obsolete systems which some
computer nerds still use.) Plaintext files take up minimal "space" to
store and can be opened/read/edited/printed even decades after the
editing program or even platform they were created with has ceased to
exist, unlike word processor files which are bound to the program or
even program version they were created with.

The main limitation of plaintext is that it fundamentally only can
contain unstyled characters, much like with typewriters. The idea behind
Markdown and other markup conventione is that a computer program can
convert the plaintext containing Markdown markup to formats with styles.
Originally the only target format was HTML, which is used for Web pages.
HTML is itself a markup format but considerably less readable than
Markdown because it uses both words and punctuation for markup.

Pandoc is a computer program which can convert between several markup
formats including but not limited to Markdown and HTML, but also to and
from Word DOCX and ODT the format used by LibreOffice which is the most
used word processor on Linux, and to PDF by producing more specialized
markup formats and feeding them to other programs. It also lets you
create and use filters which can apply various transformations to a
text, search and replace "on steroids" as computer nerds say. You could
for example swap boldface and italics throughout a document --- good
luck trying to do that with word's search and replace. Typically you
"tag" paragraphs and runs of text in a relatively unobtrusive way so
that a filter can apply arbitrary target format dependent styling to
them.

The main advantages of this approach apart from portability (in my case
between phones, pads and laptops, and Pandoc runs on all of them!) is
that Markdown is relatively distraction free: there are no font faces,
font sizes, margins and the like while editing which keeps you focused
on the actual content, the essentials. The adage is that rather than the
word processor/graphical interface way of What You See Is What You Get
(WYSIWYG, pronounced "wizzywig") this is What You Get Is What You Mean
(WYGIWYM "wiggywim"). With Pandoc it is dead easy to produce versions of
the same document for web and print, and also to exchange documents with
people using word processors. In short Pandoc helps keeping me, my
clients and the printer and the archivist all happy!

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