Basically since elementary school, you’ve been taught that Microsoft Word is the One True Way™. In this talk, we’ll teach you how to transform the terminal into the ultimate writing tool. We’ll be covering LaTeX and Markdown, tools which let you create things from resumes, to beautiful Math and CS homeworks, to blogs, and beyond.
LaTeX is immensely useful for making PDFs using plain text, especially so for PDFs containing math. There are a number of things you might want to do with LaTeX, like install it, learn the syntax, and try your hand at writing some.
Markdown is a different approach to composing rich documents using just plain text files. It began as a way to quickly write the content of web pages without having to write verbose HTML. Nowadays, it shows up in many, many places as a quick way to write richly formatted text, even if you’re not building websites.
Unfortunately, Markdown is much more loosely specified than LaTeX. There are many different “standards,” and each supports a different set of features and extensions. GitHub has a good article outlining the most common features, but it’s probably sufficient to look at some sample Markdown documents and their outputs. Check out the README from the LaTeX sample above, and it’s source.
Taking a step up from READMEs, Markdown works really well for making certain types of websites that are content-heavy. It might surprise you, but this course website is actually written primarily using Markdown (source). It uses a framework called Jekyll which takes a project with a certain directory structure and set of templates and compiles the pages into HTML. Jekyll is also useful for making your own personal blog (source).
There’s one other amazing tool for writing LaTeX and Markdown called Pandoc. Pandoc is a program that lets you convert between nearly any two plain text document formats. This includes things like Markdown, LaTeX, HTML, and more. In particular, Pandoc supports a variant of Markdown that allows you to mix Markdown and LaTeX math both in the same file. When combined with a LaTeX template, it can vastly simplify how much you have to write in your homeworks.
We’ve put together a Markdown sample similar to the LaTeX sample above to demonstrate what it looks like and to give you some scaffolding.
The command line utility grip (available on GitHub) is another tool that
people use frequently for quickly previewing a Markdown file. By running grip
foo.md you can easily compile and view a Markdown file in your web browser.
There are a number of things you can try out on your own time to start tinkering with plain text writing flows.