By now, you have seen most of the features of Markdown and Pandoc. I have not covered all the features, but you should have a good idea of what you can do with these tools and be able to learn more from online manuals.

With Markdown you do not have quite as much control over typesetting and document structure as you would have, for example, in LaTeX, but the substantially simpler syntax for many markup instructions makes it much easier to work with. Especially for tables, lists, and figures, where LaTeX’s syntax can take the focus away from the actual content of your document.

From time to time, you need more than Markdown can do by itself, but then Pandoc has several handles you can turn. If you need to specify formatting beyond Markdown, you have templates, and if you need to transform your document while formatting it, you can preprocess it or use filters to rewrite it.

If you have to write new templates and new filters for each new document, then there is nothing gained from using Markdown and Pandoc compared to formatting each document manually, using, for example, LaTeX or Word. If you are like me, however, you can reuse a few templates for all your documents, and the occasions where you need a new filter are few and far between—and I have never experienced writing a filter that I did not use more than once.

I hope that you have found this introduction to Markdown and Pandoc instructive and that you will enjoy writing Markdown in the future.