Pandoc

Pandoc is a universal document converter. Read more here

Install Pandoc

You can obtain pandoc installer from here Or you can install it with choco:

choco install pandoc

Add Templates

If you want to add templates to pandoc, you should figure out its working directory. You can obtain its working directory by checking the output of pandoc --version, e.g:

pandoc.exe 2.10.1
Compiled with pandoc-types 1.21, texmath 0.12.0.2, skylighting 0.8.5
Default user data directory: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\pandoc
Copyright (C) 2006-2020 John MacFarlane
Web:  https://pandoc.org
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is no warranty, not even for merchantability or fitness
for a particular purpose.

You can create a directory named Templates in the obtained directory and put your templates there.

Convert formats

To convert from docx to markdown:

pandoc.exe -f docx -t markdown_strict -i <source_filename> -o <output.md> --wrap=none --atx-headers --extract-media=.

• markdown-strict is the type of Markdown. Other variants exist in the Pandoc documentation. For example, gfm is for Github-Flavored Markdown.
• --wrap=none ensures that text in the new .md files doesn’t get wrapped to new lines after 80 characters
• --atx-headers makes headers in the new .md files appear as # h1, ## h2 and so on
• --extract-media=. selects the current directory to store the media files.

To convert from markdown to docx (gfm = github flavoured markdown):

pandoc.exe -f gfm -t docx -i Research-Ideas.md -o Research-Ideas1.docx
# or 
pandoc.exe -f markdown -t docx -i Research-Ideas.md -o Research-Ideas1.docx

If you want to add highlighting options to the conversion to docx format from markdown, you can use --highlight-style= option.

pandoc -f markdown -t docx --highlight-style=breezedark -i Input.md -o Output.md

# To see more highlighting options:
pandoc --list-highlight-styles

On windows Powershell, one can run this command to convert all of the docx files in the current directory to markdown format:

ForEach ($result in Get-ChildItem | select Name, BaseName) { pandoc.exe -f docx -t markdown_strict -i $result.Name -o "$($result.BaseName).md" --wrap=none --atx-headers --extract-media=. }