And below you will find a step by step guide on how to make it happen. Well… it turned out managing bibliography in a Markdown document isn’t really possible in the same way as in LaTeX. So I happily started typing away but quickly decided to include bibliography on-the-fly, so as not to make a huge mess in the end. If you want to see how this works in-depth, here’s a good cheatsheet that I used a lot: For example, when you want something in bold you type ** text**. Enter Markdown.įor those who are not familiar: Markdown is a simplified markup language, where one can easily specify basic styling rules. I simply needed to have something that would enable me to quickly assign basic formatting rules in raw text on-the-fly and then render the whole article into a standardized, pretty piece of writing. And no, I did not type that by hand, I would have flown off the handle halfway through.
#MACDOWN COMMANDS CODE#
If you failed to notice, the code above is a one-page table. thesis formatted in LaTeX: \toprule \begin But to let you get the idea why I started looking for an alternative, here’s a ‘tiny’ sample from my own B.Sc. Use BibTeX and bibliography stops being a problem. You see, LaTeX is one of the most powerful document preparation systems widely considered as the golden standard and by using it you can empower yourself to generate really, really beautiful professionally-looking documents. I sort-of heard and saw what LaTeX was way before and when I sort-of looked into the cheatsheets I was like: But I met this guy from bioinformatics and I asked him what solution would he suggest.
It just didn’t meet my reliability and usability expectations.Īt this point I was ready to get Office for Mac.
#MACDOWN COMMANDS SOFTWARE#
I may get slapped in the comments by some diehard LibreOffice fans, but hey, I really love the concept of open-source software but LibreOffice really didn’t work for me. Nothing was where it should be but I could probably bear with it as long as the performance were alright. WRONG! I installed this thing on my Mac and tried it. Duh, I would obviously use LibreOffice to type away my thesis, right? So the typical student-like scrooginess took over. Plus, I already paid for an Evernote subscription. But the same day I discovered Mendeley, a citation manager from Elsevier which is also free, has an iOS app, does the same job as Zotero and has awesome plugins for MS Word and LibreOffice. The guy showed us around the app and citation plugin that we could use within LibreOffice or MS Word and this thing was lit. Imagine moving those citations around, keeping them all in accordance with an assumed citation style, making sure everything is included in the bibliography section… Enter citation managers and the most obvious, free, open-source option: Zotero. Being a happy little university kiddo I didn’t realize bibliography can be a problem until one of the teachers explained to us how daunting the task of managing citations might be.
.jpg "macdown commands")
That was right before the first year of my studies. I switched to a Mac a few years ago and never looked back towards PCs. But before I get technical let me start with a short background story. That is, provided you know what Markdown is. If you have ever written at least one scientific paper you might have read the title and started wondering whether I’m a sane person.
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