L'écriture académique au format texte avec Markdown et Pandoc

Abstract

This volume is a new, thoroughly revised and substantially expanded edition of "Markdown & vous", originally published in 2023 on the University of Liège's e-publish platform. Academic writing lies at the heart of scholarly activity. Whether drafting an article, a report, a presentation, or contributing to a collective work, the methods, tools, and formats used have evolved considerably over the past thirty years with the advent of digital technologies. The typewriter is a distant memory, yet today word processors—dominated by Word and based on the same underlying principle—have become the default tool. Office software offers authors ready-made solutions that automatically handle questions of format and method, but in doing so, they progressively strip away autonomy and technical control. To regain agency in the face of the functional imperatives and the surveillance capitalism of the software industry, it is essential to rethink our methods, tools, and formats. This book offers a reflection on a sustainable, open, and free approach that restores full control over the writing process. Centred on the Markdown format—a simple, human-readable, and semantically structured language whose syntactic minimalism ensures long-term usability—this approach promotes a return to the essentials: writing, illustrating, editing, and then publishing, in the right order and without unnecessary loss of time or energy. Choosing Markdown frees authors from dependency on specific software, unlike traditional word processing tools.