I used pandoc to generate latex from markdown while studying philosophy in graduate school, I even came up with a little executable tarball that generated a dir

I used pandoc to generate latex from markdown while studying philosophy in graduate school, I even came up with a little executable tarball that generated a directory structure in the the way I wanted, with a shell script to handle building everything properly. I find that this route is best for documents that you are writing: you can focus on the content and use a nice markdown editor like Ulysses without having to worry too much about formatting. On the other hand, when I'm trying to typeset a pre-existing text for reading/distribution, I find it a lot easier to copy and paste the text into a latex template and then tweak it incrementally until everything looks the way I want it to.