---
tags: HVAC, general, programming
---

# You Should Learn Markdown

This is a quick article about why you should learn markdown.

## What is markdown

Markdown is a "mark-up" language. It allows you to write content in plain text that can be easily
converted to other formats, such as **html, pdf, docx**, and many more. All the articles written on
this website are written in markdown, here's an image of this article written in markdown.

![markdown](/articles/images/2023-10-21-markdown.png)

The reason you should learn markdown is that it allows you to focus on the content / text of your
content with simple concepts for formatting. Markdown is used heavily in documenting software
projects, which is how I got introduced to it, however it can scale all the way up to writing
research papers or even books.

I use markdown for probably 80% of all the text documents I need to write, from company documents,
web / software documentation, and so on. It allows me to get content out quickly without having to
click around with formatting options in a program like **Word** or **Pages**. To be clear, a lot of
the reports and things I generate for my **Home Performance Assessments** are written using
**Pages** (for now at least) because I have templates that make the documents look more
professional, however I am working on solutions to migrate those to be markdown based.

Markdown is supported in mostly all the **Google** tools, as well as the **Outlook** email client
(which is one of my least favorite tools, BTW). It makes it simple to create tables, lists, and many
common document related tasks.

## Resources

You can learn more about the syntax used for markdown at
[markdownguide.org](https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/).

### A non-exhaustive list of where you can use Markdown and editors.

| Platform     | Description                                                     |
| ------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Google       | Most goggle tools support markdown, docs, sheets, etc.          |
| Outlook      | Although I hate outlook email client, it does support markdown. |
| Dillinger.io | An online tool for writing / previewing markdown                |
| MarkText     | A multi-platform editor for writing markdown                    |

You can use tools such as [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/#) to convert Markdown files to other formats.

![pandoc](/articles/images/2023-10-21-pandoc.gif)

## Conclusion

I hope that you take the time to research and see if Markdown is good fit for your document /
content creation.

Thanks for reading until the end!