How to use Overleaf to Write your papers: Part III: How to use Markdown with Overleaf with help from Git and Pandoc

You can easily use Markdown in a Plain Text Writing App and update a neatly formatted Overleaf document with all its bells and whistles. Here’s how.

Part I of this Series
Part II of this Series

It’s great to be able to write in LaTeX and use Overleaf. Basically, all you have to do is to write in LaTex anywhere and just upload the tex file to Overleaf. Or you can also use the Wysiwyg editor in Overleaf to add content. However, there is another way: using Markdown in a plain text editor and build up Overleaf and push everywhere through Overleaf.

Markdown was designed by John Gruber in 2004. It is a great way to write clean, styled document using only plain text and nothing more. The structure of writing Markdown documents is highly standardised, and very intuitive. A Markdown document is also very clean to read and share with people who do not know anything about Markdown at all. You should be able to edit Markdown documents in any text editor (but avoid, if you can MS Word or Google Docs, or OpenOffice or LibreOffice), any office doc system is not the best tool. You can use a notepad to write in markdown. There are excellent web based tools to write markdown as well. Learn more about Markdown here: