Markdown is a simple system for adding formatting information to plain text documents. It's both easy to read and easy to write, so many projects use Markdown as their formatting language of choice. Despite its simplicity, tools like Python and pandoc can convert Markdown to a surprising number of other formats, including

• Microsoft Word documents
• web pages in HTML
• slide presentations
• ePub books
• and more!

This presentation will explain why you should use Markdown, and show Markdown in action. I'll also demonstrate how to convert Markdown to variety of useful formats, and describe some helpful tools for working with Markdown text.