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)
I really enjoyed this tutorial! Some of the elements I was more familiar with, such as the _italicization underscores_ and **asterisks for bolding**, because I use Discord and they have the same short hands. I do prefer Discord’s more flexible platform, that allows for users’ intent to come across a bit more easily – for example, a single asterisk surrounding a word *like this* would result in italicization. But overall I found Markup very intuitive, and I’m excited to see where I can apply it in the future!
In response to the latter half of the prompt – I’m hoping to make my research available online at some point, so it would be great to be able to format it for the web & also be able to version control using platforms like Markup!
Learning from the tutorials, Markdown is easy to grasp. I can see it is intelligible to general users for formatting and tidying up articles.
Conversely, it doesn’t seem easy from aspect that retrieving the accidentally deleted content without backup, .
This was a fun activity! Writing with Markdown is a lot like writing a website using HTML. In terms of benefit, I can appreciate the potential flexibility it brings to my future documentation. I like the idea of not being beholden to proprietary software 🙂
I enjoyed doing the Markdown tutorial. It seems like a great, easy to use formatting option. I’ll keep this in mind as a tool in my toolbox.
Dillinger was a lot of fun to use! I experimented using lecture notes I had drafted in Notepad++. On their own, they aren’t much to look at, but, with a little finessing in Dillinger it was easy to see how my plain document could be organized in a way much more likely to make sense to a reader who isn’t me. I appreciate the ease of use offered by Notepad++, and avoid wrestling with formatting options offered by commercial word processors whenever possible. It’s easy to envision how my basic Notepad++ note-taking could incorporate a handful of markdown elements, thereby still providing the low-frills environment I want to work in, while still allowing for easy export to a more aesthetically-pleasing form.
Working in Dillinger reminded me of one of my favorite web-tools that I used to learn regular expressions, regexr.com. Regular expressions also comes into play in the Notepad++ environment. As a somewhat ‘guess-and-check’ learner, I appreciate the flexibility offered by both tools of being able to experiment and see what does/doesn’t work in real-time. I can also foresee how it might be possible create reg ex macros in Notepad++ to convert plain notes to markdown. Exciting!
I always found using editors and computer language to be really difficult and intimidating. But after going through markdown tutorial and using dillinger, I found that it is not so hard and really interesting. I am not sure how applicable it will be to my work right now. But I am still an early career librarian and I might pursue web services positions later in my career.
I have recently been learning about Wiki markdown language, and it looks like there are a fair number of similarities.
I could see using Markdown to write an article especially if you are unsure of the format/style requirements of the journals you wish to submit it to – Markdown would let you change formats and certain style things much faster than Word, I bet!
I really enjoyed testing out Markdown and running through the tutorial. I’ve worked through some similar tutorials on CodeAcademy and used both HTML and different WYSIWYG editors, so I felt it was fairly similar concepts but much more straightforward. I liked the flexibility of the tool, but would definitely need a lot of practice for it to come naturally (and quickly enough to use in an efficient way!). I think it would be helpful especially in my work for accessible document storage.
I wasn’t familiar with Markdown before this, and like others, I found the tutorial to be very helpful. I could see myself using Dillinger to create a markdown document for a readme file. In a project that I recently handed off, I documented the workflows in a Google doc, but did so more out of an intuition that the information should be documented for future contributors than to adhere to an open workflow practice. After going through the module on open workflows, I have a better vocabulary and tool set for approaching this in the future. I think it would make a lot of sense to use Markdown for this kind of documentation, for a few reasons: the flexibility of publishing in different formats (such as a PDF or a slide deck) from one source document would make it easy for me to share the workflow with different audiences; the use of internal linking would make it easier to create new versions when there is an update; and the ability to visually spruce up a .txt file to make it easier to read.
Although I’ve used markdown basics before, Dillinger allowed me to discover some new ways of representing information in markdown. In using it, I attempted to reformat project meeting notes, and the options I discovered for representing blocks of code, inserting images, and creating tables would definitely be useful to better represent some of the elements discussed in project meetings.
Often otherwise, I would create a separate document to represent these elements and link to it within the meeting notes, as I did not know how I could implement them in markdown, leading to there being more documents to consult to get a full overview of what was discussed. Being able to incorporate this more advanced formatting in markdown would help centralize information instead.
I learned about tools such as Remark (GitHub project) and Cleaver (GitHub project) for making presentations that I would like to try in the future. I also enjoyed the https://www.markdowntutorial.com/ for how easily it lets you practice applying different markdown elements.
This was great fun. Any opportunity I have to learn more about coding is a bonus. Although, I did already know some of the information presented in this series of tutorials, I still managed to learn some new things about presenting information, namely, creating accessible texts that can be read by screen readers.
Experimenting with Markdown really brought back some coding skills I forgot I had! The flexibility of this program makes it easy to create and show relevant work, and make sit more accessible than other publishing tools such as Academia. Keeping this as a useful tool in my toolbox for future research I want to publish.
Valuable information. Fortunate me I discovered your site unintentionally, and I am surprised why
this coincidence did not took place in advance! I bookmarked it.
I am doubtful that people will post honest opinions here unless they happen to be very positive (because they have to leave their name and email to post). However, the module on open education has been quite useful.
I enjoyed trying Dilinger and Markdown! Markdown is particularly intuitive! I will probably use these tools in the future for website development?
The tutorial is very helpful. It was a pretty intuitive and fun activity in the end with the live preview. Using MarkDown will ensure that we achieve the needs of Open Data, ensuring that our data will be accessible, universal, and readable in the future.
Two of the main benefits of Markdown are interoperability and portability through both time and space.
I am super excited at the prospect of learning more about Markdown and markup languages more generally – it seems like something I could be good at while also being helpful throughout different aspects of research data management.
I have completed two different tasks for this month. But I would be interested to know how this is different from LaTex. I have been working with LaTex intensely and I really love the separation from plain text/ formatted text. Is there any benefit in using this system, if you work already with LaTeX?
I truly admire the engaging way you present information on your blog. It feels like I’m engaging in a captivating conversation with a friend, making even complex topics feel approachable and enjoyable to explore.