UCL Learning Portfolio

The basics and beyond with Markdown. Make the move to reproducible analysis and lightweight document production,.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that allows the creation of formatted documents using only plain text. It is designed so that it can be converted to many formats using conversion tools such as Pandoc. Markdown is often used to format readme files, for blogging, and to create rich text reports for reproducible research that combine analytical code and narrative.

In this course we will learn how to create and render basic documents using both plain text editors (such as Notepad++) and Pandoc, and the integrated programming environment RStudio.

The course consists of one two-hour hands-on, online session.

This course does not cover programming or data analysis.

Once you have enrolled, please check that you have received a confirmation email from MyLearning. You will also receive an email with a joining link at least one day before the session.

Courses start on the hour but please join during the 5 minutes prior to this to download resources and test out your connection/audio.

For more details on how to book, cancel and join sessions please visit our practical course information page.

• explain the advantages of using plaint text for document creation
• author basic documents using Notepad++ and RStudio use simple formatting including:
• bold
• italic
• headings
• typeset simple mathematical expressions
• insert links and images
• insert citations and reference lists using markdown and BibTeX
• Render a document to HTML, PDF or Microsoft Word formats