papers-in-markdown

Papers in Markdown

It might be nice to write astronomy papers in Markdown instead of directly in TeX. This is a set of templates for pandoc to enable that.

There is currently support for AASTeX, MNRAS, and A&A. I welcome contributions for other journals.

In case you are hesitant about committing to Markdown when writing your papers, if you eventually come to a point where it seems easier to do something in LaTeX, pandoc will pass LaTeX through so you can directly embed it into the Markdown file. Alternately you can convert the Markdown file into a LaTeX file and simply pick up editing the LaTeX directly, just as if you had been writing in LaTeX all along.

Journal Templates

Templates are included for the following journals:

• aastex62: use for all American Astronomical Society Journals
• MNRAS: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• aa: Astronomy & Astrophysics (both traditional and structured abstracts)

Note that the aastex62 template has the most descriptive information while the others are relatively bare-bones. Additionally, the necessary style files are not included in this distribution; you must obtain those from the relevant journal.

Why not a single template for all journals (specifying in the YAML header which to use)? It's certainly possible, but it would add another level of if/elseif/else to the template and potentially complicate keeping the pandoc templates up to date.

Requirements

Software

These templates require:

• pandoc
• A (La)TeX typesetting engine (If you want to make a PDF instead of just stopping at TeX source)

Technically optional, but since I have never seen a paper without citations and in-text references, you will also probably want:

• pandoc-citeproc
• pandoc-crossref

Ancillary Files

In order to create a PDF from your Markdown source (or the demos included here) you will need the appropriate style file for the journal. These are not needed to create TeX or other output formats.

Licensing

Documentation

The document template and sample document are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Code

Code is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 (or later).