Markdown is a sustainable method to write. Your text becomes simply text read by the computer rather than text with stylesheets and all sorts of encoding attached to it. Thus anyone can copy and paste it, read it, etc. all from the source. Markdown, then, is in many ways a way to write collaborative documents to be used by current and potential users. At the base, you should make your work available in plain text, especially if you know it will be used quite a bit. Markdown is also very easy to master. Someone in class said they only write in HTML. But this markup text with such unnecessary elements that makes working with your source very difficult. Markdown is also a streamlined and productive way to write. This is why Markdown has replaced methods like HTML as an industry standard.
But what do you actually do when you need to apply certain stylesheets to markdown, convert it, etc. Pandora is a command line tool that can do all sorts of things for markdown. You can convert to different formats like word or pdf. But you can also streamline more of your writing process. I swear, markdown should be a standard in the humanities. The thought of microsoft word makes me queasy. Used in conjunction with Zotero, which we discuss in the coming weeks, humanities scholars can collect resources and manage their references with Zotero, download the bibliography file associated with those references, and use Pandoc to convert them to markdown. Pandora will also change the citation style, from Chicago to inline, etc.