Introduction to Markdown and Modern Document Workflow

Abstract
Outputting documents has been a critical step when doing Data Science. After finishing your project, your professors or supervisors typically ask you to upload a PDF for reporting. Yes, Microsoft Word (and other WYSIWYG software) is great but there are certainly options for the rest of us who want to focus on writing rather than formatting, include citations and math equations painlessly, and execute code to generate data visualizations. During this talk, I will first give a brief introduction on why I prefer Markdown to Microsoft Word and LaTeX. Then, I will present the basics of Markdown syntax with a minimal Markdown editor Typora. Finally, it will be a tour on modern document workflow using a selection of tools in the Markdown ecosystem, i.e. R Markdown and Pandoc.