| A few reasons. 1) Markdown is considerably less verbose than LaTeX. 2) Not a fan of rich text. MS Word has kind of ruined it for me, every time I write something in MS Word there it feels like some funky invisible formatting ends up messing up my document. Markdown is still all plain text so weird formatting bugs won't sneak in and I can version control it trivially with Git. 3) LaTeX has some bullshit that consistently screws me up, like having to differentiate between forward quotes and backward quotes using backticks. 4) With the Pandoc flavor of Markdown it is easy to drop into LaTeX for equations, and I can also directly use BibTeX citations. 5) If I use Markdown, I can very easily get Pandoc to directly convert it to nearly any document format I want, and it does a very good job doing so, this includes LaTeX or XeLaTeX or ConTeXt if I want to render a PDF. I don't hate LaTeX or anything, I just find Markdown more pleasant, and with Pandoc I can easily convert it to LaTeX later to render. |