Many of my colleagues ask how I set up my system for authoring in Markdown with its automatically formated citations and easy output to PDF, DOCX, and HTML, but the learning curve can be quite steep and many are scared away when I say things like “command line.” I recently found this excellent article over at the Programming Historian. It assumes next to no knowledge about the tools involved, starting at the very beginning. It is more useful for my purposes than many of the Markdown guides out there because it is written by an academic for other academics, so the guide includes things like Pandoc’s footnotes and citations (which are extensions of standard markdown).