Kudos for this great, yet simple and lean toolchain!
Anyone familiar with command line tools and a corresponding aversion for bloated WYSIWYG apps will second the underlying idea that MS Word (and the likes) “should die” in favor of plain text workflows.
Yet, with the help of Pandoc (which does the heavy lifting in these boilerplates), nothing prevents you to keep using Word as a front-end and plug it in this exact same workflow. Word may not be the best-of-bread typesetting engine or layouting tool, but to many it still is useful as a quite decent word processor.
For those interested, I did a (long-read) write-up on how one could go from Word over Markdown to even InDesign (as an alternative templating/typesetting engine, instead of LaTeX/XeTeX): http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/
Anyone familiar with command line tools and a corresponding aversion for bloated WYSIWYG apps will second the underlying idea that MS Word (and the likes) “should die” in favor of plain text workflows.
Yet, with the help of Pandoc (which does the heavy lifting in these boilerplates), nothing prevents you to keep using Word as a front-end and plug it in this exact same workflow. Word may not be the best-of-bread typesetting engine or layouting tool, but to many it still is useful as a quite decent word processor.
For those interested, I did a (long-read) write-up on how one could go from Word over Markdown to even InDesign (as an alternative templating/typesetting engine, instead of LaTeX/XeTeX): http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/