What is markdown and why might I use it? I use scrivener to write novels, short stories, and anything that has subdocs or reference documents. I’ve used it for about ten years but I still have no idea what markdown is! I did try the forum but didn’t find the answer.
Uff, you’re opening Pandora’s box. 
I hope I’m not saying anything wrong. Some of the users were always worried that specially formatted text (e.g. RTF) could no longer be read at some point. They want absolute security and choose a form that will work for all eternity: Markdown.
Thanks fto. Now I can stop wondering if I’m missing a tool that could help me with projects.
Rob
Don’t rejoice too soon. There will be others who see it differently … more nuanced 
There’s a chapter on Markdown in the manual. It’s essentially a markup language, combined with tools for translating that markup into a wide variety of formats. In addition to the portability aspect, some people find that it’s easier to use Markdown for the kind of formatting that academics need, in particular because it works well with LaTeX.
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I find markdown useful to ensure that I don’t accidentally strip out formatting, specifically, italics placed for emphasis or foreign words.
Using * to bracket a word makes italics stick no matter how hard I try to foul up things.
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Markdown is plain text that avoids the problem of vendor lock in.
For instance in years to come, you might have a lot of work in Scrivener that is inaccessible to you because it’s in a proprietary format. Whereas plain text will always be plain text and will be accessible in some app or another.
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I like writing in markdown, but I usually only do this for documents where I need headings and links. My preference is to use text editors, rather than Scrivener as text editors are more versatile. I like being able to format by designating headers and links by text markup rather than styles. This makes technical writing flow far more easily for me.
I am not sure how useful markdown is for fiction writing, where the need for tables, headers and links is questionable. On a Mac, Scrivener with Marked 2 is an excellent combination.
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Note that Scrivener is not a “proprietary format.” All of the component files in the project are either RTF or XML. It’s tedious, but entirely possible, to extract your work without access to Scrivener.
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I feel the simplest answer to the “why” question is that it is a matter of preference in how you prefer to write. Sure, there are a lot of pros and cons worth examining, and some of those might well tip the balance over preference in some cases, where the advantage is extreme (such as aforementioned academic, sciences and technical work).
The basic question all by itself doesn’t say anything about the kind of work you are writing, though. Markdown is just as good for novels as it is for publishing a research paper. The difference is that you’ll be learning far less of it for the former—but that’s how it goes for any system. Someone that needs tables, equations, cross-references, caption numbering and other fancy things is going to need to learn more of whatever they use. Having to learn less of anything, to do what you need to do, isn’t I don’t think a negative all on its own. Markdown can scale far beyond what Scrivener can do without it, but it can also do the simpler things just as well, at least in my opinion.
Now for some opinions on what some of those aforementioned pros and cons are:
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You can use it anywhere. I don’t mean that there is a lot more software out there across all devices for it (although that is true), I mean you can use it anywhere. Everything about it is typed in, using standard markings you’ll find on all keyboards. A manual typewriter and an OCR setup can do Markdown!
So this is two-pronged, you can use it in places that have minimal software (like one of those cool e-ink Freewrite devices), and for places that have lots of software, there are lots of great editors and supporting programs. In part it’s because supporting Markdown itself is so simple it lets developers spend their time on things other than the mechanics of how text is formatted. Make a rich text program and that’s where you’ll be spending a huge chunk of your time, which leaves less for the surroundings.[1]
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That premise is another part of what some find appealing with it as well. It’s very simple to learn and write with, and your muscle memory is the same everywhere you go, from that Freewrite to a nice Markdown writing program on your phone, or Scrivener in front of a 27" monitor—it’s clean and consistent. For the formatting of the text, you always do the same things and thus you have to learn less of any system you pick up. For example, setting aside the appearance/design of it entirely, compare how much learning you have to do to use headings properly in Scrivener+RTF, with Markdown, where the answer is as simple as typing “#” in front of the heading line; in any program you use, that’s how you make a chapter title.[2]
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It is true, there is the longevity argument as well, mentioned above, but I wouldn’t put as much stress on that one. As something that is in essence just a .txt file, your writings will remain functional indefinitely. More importantly, because it is so simple, the tools that work with it are likely to remain functional far beyond their expiration dates. It’s complicated software like Scrivener and word processors that tend to vanish once OS developers abandon old coding methods (witness the sad loss of Scrivener v1 and v2 for Mac users, unless you have an ancient computer). The types of tools that make Markdown turn into other document types are of a kind that are far more resilient to change.
I don’t think RTF is going anywhere soon (to be clear), but the fact does remain: it was essentially abandoned 18 years ago. While many rich text editing programs do still support it, many never have, and more are now dropping it or letting old bugs sit (deprecating it), and that even includes major programs like MS Word mobile.[3] While I personally wouldn’t worry about the longevity of an RTF file too much (conversion utilities will carry it), that it is a “dead” format with waning support does loop back to one of the earlier arguments: finding stuff that can edit it can be a lot more difficult, particularly on mobile, and that narrows your options significantly. That’s probably the bigger present-tense problem than a decades-long slip into eventual obscurity.
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This one could be considered a pro or a con, and that is that you will have to do most of your formatting elsewhere. The distinction here is that Scrivener+RTF users can do most or all of their formatting with the compiler. Markdown itself is a kind of compiler of its own (in fact one could draw a number of parallels in ethos between the compiler and Markdown), and has its own separate external learning curve.
The implication being made here is that one has a greatly reduced need to learn Scrivener’s compiler. Your usage of it will tend to in many case be very simple and basic—I very often only use one single Section Layout—and will instead be spending more time making things look good in one’s LibreOffice or Word template, designing the eBook in dedicated tools for doing so, or to one of the many dozens of file types supported by these tools. These efforts can almost always be integrated into Scrivener’s compile settings for effortless single-click output in the future. So nothing really changes there—again, it’s all about where you put your learning effort.
Myself, I consider that an advantage. Why spend a ton of time learning something that has but a tiny fraction of the design capabilities other tools have? I’d always be running into frustrating barriers, being unable to make the designs I want to make, all the while knowing other tools can. So why not just cut to the chase, get a dirt simple output from Scrivener, and spend my time learning and using the best tools for the job? Markdown as a workflow enforces that approach, and makes it efficient to reuse and refine upon.
Ultimately, use what works for you. I left rich text editing behind many years ago because it didn’t work for me. It had less to do with some of the above, and more to do with the fact that I just didn’t feel creative when using programs that worked that way.
Scrivener is a bit of an exception there, but in large part because of its heavy dependency on largely stock rich text editing components. ↩︎
Yes, you can and would often want to have the compiler generate the headings for you in Scrivener, but that’s still all you are having it do, not the huge pile of things that headings do with the rich text workflow. ↩︎
The entire purpose of RTF existing as a file format was for Microsoft to provide a public format that developers like us could use to interface with Word. Now that Word has a public format, it has no reason to exist other than the fact that it does. That MS considered it okay to leave out of a version of Word itself is telling. Apple as well left it out of Pages for years, on all platforms (they reinstated it, but so poorly I doubt it gets much use). ↩︎
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Another question is even more fundamental. How much formatting do you personally want to do? A manuscript that will ultimately be handed over to a professional designer is different from a manuscript that you intend to personally take all the way to publication.
(Self-publishers can hire professional designers, too. This is about who does the work, not who pays for it.)
If you plan to have someone else do the final formatting, then the goal is simply to find a tool that (1) makes your intent clear and (2) is easy to incorporate into their workflow. That will often, though not always, mean Word output. If your goal is a publication-quality PDF, then you’ll need to be much more personally concerned with the design details.
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Why I Use Markdown
Two years ago, the answer would have been that I didn’t. Today, I wonder if I’ll be able to continue using my favorite editor (Scrivener) if it doesn’t improve its support for Markdown.
In just two years, all my writing, which typically falls into three categories, has shifted from rich text (and a mix of it, program code, and Multi-Markdown) to nearly exclusively Multi-Markdown. My three categories are: 1) book writing, 2) writing technical papers and documenting my work as an architect and engineer, and 3) personal note-taking.
Of the three, only #2—documenting my work—was where I might have used Markdown in the past. Multi-Markdown is the default format for documenting program code. While my work also includes electrical and mechanical engineering, in addition to software, it’s usually the latter that drives the greatest need for writing.
What’s changed in the past two years is the rise of AI. Markdown has become the best format for two-way data exchange. For book writing, I can give a good LLM the same instructions I’d give a human editor, and, with the latest technologies, I can now receive comparable editing results. The key to productivity is sending and receiving edits in Markdown. This allows the AI to not only make context-specific edits but also maintain formatting, tables, diagrams (like PlantUML and Mermaid), and even embedded program code.
Another factor is that, around the same time AI advanced, there were fewer human resources available to help my work via the exchange of Word documents. This has further driven the use of AI tools as alternatives.
So, while I still use Scrivener for #1, I’ve moved to Yank Note and Obsidian for #2 and #3. Even my book drafts over the past year are a mix of Markdown and rich text—something I wish wasn’t the case. I’d love to edit exclusively in Scrivener using Markdown, possibly with an interface option like Obsidian provides, so I don’t have to switch between separate preview and edit modes.
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A quick shout-out to Marked, which can provide realtime previews of Markdown content from your Scrivener document. Keep it running next to Scrivener as tiled windows, and you won’t have to switch between separate preview and edit modes. Marked can even preview Mermaid diagrams.
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