Markdown Templates

This repository contains document templates for writing with Markdown. It is related to the article Scientific Writing with Markdown, which discussed how to write documents, including scientific reports, using Markdown. The article was inspired by the article How to make a scientific-looking PDF from Markdown (with bibliography).

The main advantage of writing documents using Markdown is its relative simplicity compared to pure LaTeX but still being simple plain text format instead of binary formats such as MS Word or Google Docs.

Requirements

The compilation process requires the following software:

• Pandoc is required for converting between the Markdown files into other document formats.
• LaTeX is required for creating PDF documents.
• Make (software) is required for using Makefiles.

Instructions

Clone the repository and copy the template directory that you wish to use.

The documents can be compiled using the Make command.

make <command>

The output will appear in the BUILDDIR directory specified in the Makefile. For more information about the templates, see the Template section.

Templates

Each document template contains the following files:

• <filename>.md contains the text written in Markdown.
• bibliography.bib contains the bibliographic entries, that is references in BibTeX format.
• Makefile contains the commands for converting the markdown file into the output document format, such as PDF, HTML, or EPUB.

The first lines of the Markdown file contain the Yaml metadata.

---
title: "Title"
date: \today
author: "Author"
bibliography: "bibliography.bib"
csl: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/citation-style-language/styles/master/harvard-anglia-ruskin-university.csl"
urlcolor: "blue"
---

• The title, data, and author variables are used for creating the title.
• The bibliography variable specifies the location of the bibliography file, in this case, bibliography.bib. Here is link to some BibTex style examples.
• The cls variable specifies the citation style, and it should point to the location of the citation style file, for example, the path or URL. Different citation styles can be found from zotero styles and citation styles.

Pandoc's documentation specifies all the different metadata variables.

The Makefile is structured as follows:

BUILDDIR=build
FILENAME=<filename>

<command>:
    mkdir $(BUILDDIR) -p  # Create the BUILDDIR if it doesn't already exist.
    pandoc $(FILENAME).md \
    ... # Options

• <filename> is the Markdown filename without the .md extension.
• <command> is substituted with the name of the document type.
• pandoc command creates the output document type. The options followed by the command are specific to the document type.