Making Word documents from Markdown
Markdown is awesome.
So awesome that there's even a standardization effort to create one common markdown.
Aside
Aside: James asked what the big appeal was. For me it's a plain text format that has built in context with minimal distracting markup. As example:
# I am a title in **Markdown**
\chapter{I am a chapter title in \textbf{\LaTeX}}
<h1>I am a heading title in <strong>HTML</strong></h1>
End Aside
Markdown in Sublime text distraction free mode might be the best authoring environment, but it's far from the best reading (especially for non-Markdown fanatics). Fortunately, pandoc exists to make conversions between formats easy. For example, to create co-worker friendly documents form .md files I use:
pandoc -s --reference-docx=reference\reference.docx -o %1.docx %1
Where reference.docx is a regular OOXML file (from MS Word) that sets up my default styles so that, for example, Markdown regular text uses the Segoe UI Light font family.
Nice.