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From Markdown to Word, With Citations George Williams Here at ProfHacker, we've written several posts about Markdown — the "syntax you (probably) already know," to quote Lincoln Mullen — and Zotero — the reference management software developed by George Mason's Center for History and New Media. As our history of posts should make clear, Markdown is great for many things, but one of the the things it doesn't handle well natively is integration with free citation management tools like Zotero. Well, it turns out some someone has come up with a workaround that does just that, involving Markdown, the editor Ulysses, text conversion tool Pandoc, and Zotero. Yesterday morning, Ryan Cordell tweeted thanks to Raphael Kolb (@lowercasename) for developing — and documenting — a workflow that involves "a beautiful interface Markdown editor paired w/robust citation management for longer writing projects." Kolb has written an admirably detailed, step-by-step guide to what he describes as "my workflow for transforming academic markdown into beautiful Word documents": Over the last few months, as I've been working on my PhD, I've set up a workflow to convert my writing (in everyone's favourite simple markup language, Markdown), as if by magic, into Word documents which I can email to my supervisor… As a bonus, this workflow turns all your citations into automatic references according to whatever style you happen to be using (Chicago, MLA, APA, MHRA, anything), with all of the appropriate ibids. and page numbers and everything. Seriously. To that end, this guide – as much for my own future benefit as anyone else's – lists everything that is required to allow me to transform what is on the left into what is on the right with a click of a … button. We do live in the future. It's a fairly involved process to set things up, but if you're a Markdown fan and you often write things that require easy integration with your Zotero collection, this looks like it's worth a try. [Lead image by Raphael Kolb, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0] RSS to Email Formatted