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Online Markdown Converter For Open Educational Resources George Williams Here at ProfHacker, we've long advocated using Markdown, a plain text markup language that doesn't require advanced software or expertise. Markdown is super useful for creating documents that are going to end up eventually being web pages… or PDFs… or e-books… or Word docs… or just about any text document, really. And being a plain-text format, Markdown allows you to share a document with pretty much anyone without having to worry about whether or not they have the right software to read it. Lincoln provided an introduction to Markdown and subsequently outlined the ways you can use Pandoc to convert Markdown (among other kinds of documents) to a wide variety of output formats. Konrad showed us how to use Markdown for presentations. Ryan explained one way to create a class or project website with Markdown. And Markdown is central to central to creating and maintaining a website using Jekyll, as Alex Gil explained in his 3-part series. There are many, many tools you can use for writing and previewing Markdown, of course, but a new resource recently came online that caught my attention. As part of their Open Educational Resources initiative, the University of Oklahoma Libraries has made available a Pandoc-based, web-hosted, open-source Markdown Converter. (And the source code is available on GitHub, if you'd like to tinker with and host your own version.) All you have to do is upload your Markdown document and choose among 4 output formats: HTML, PDF, EPUB, or DOCX. You may also choose (or customize) a stylesheet to control visual presentation. Due to its ease of use, this is a conversion tool that has the potential to increase Markdown adoption among academic authors and teachers. How about you? What are your favorite Markdown tools? Please share in the comments. RSS to Email Formatted