Markdown Templates and Introduction

This repository contains Arabic and English Markdown templates for professional and academic documents with simple YAML front matter. These templates make use of markdown extensions and LaTeX typesetting engines in Pandoc to make simple documents much more professional and easily adaptable to many use cases. The templates are free to use and adapt.

The repo also has an example document with content demonstrating and explaining markdown's different text forms, headings, lists, tables, ...

This is a companion repository for the Google Developer Group (GDGMena) YouTube livestream session Advanced Markdown ماركداون :مستندات ووثائق جميلة سهلة 2. The video explains all parts of the templates and examples in the Arabic language.

Recommended Tools

Here we will list recommended tools for working with Markdown.

Popular Markdown Editors on all Operating Systems

This is a bulleted list of Markdown editors:

• Windows: ghostwriter or Markdown Monster
• Mac: MacDown, iA Writer, or Marked 2
• Linux: ReText or ghostwriter
• iOS / Android: iA Writer
• Web: Dillinger or StackEdit

Pandoc: the Great Document Converter

The king of document converters and a very powerful tool on its own is Pandoc. You can download it from https://pandoc.org/.

Pandoc usage is easy:

pandoc -s sourceFile.md -o outputFile.pdf

For converting Arabic documents we recommend using the following option

pandoc -s --pdf-engine=lualatex sourceFile.md -o outputFile.pdf

You can simply change the outputFile extension for other file formats like

• .doc
• .docx
• .html
• .odt

Many other formats are supported. You can also convert from these formats to Markdown and to each other using Pandoc by simply changing the sourceFile extension.

My Favourite Editors

This is a numbered list of my favourite Markdown editors:

1. Visual Studio Code for English and for developers
2. Ghostwriter: for Arabic and non developers

Recommended VS Code Extensions

With Visual Studio Code the following extensions are highly recommended:

• vscode-pandoc
• markdownlint
• LanguageTool Linter