@ Elena: I installed Pandoc using its installer and installed the Writage plugin for Word. When I try to save a document as an MD file, writage complains that Pandoc is not installed. I have tried rebooting, moving pandoc.exe to another directory and installing a shortcut in the Start menu (Win 7).

Is there some magic I am missing?

Actually you don’t need to convert .md files into .doc format to be able to open it in Word. You can install a Writage plugin for MS Word and open and edit .md files as any other document.

Also you could save any Word document which you receive from you colleague as Markdown file and continue to work with your favorite Markdown tool

Sorry for my dirty comment.
Here is the link to my MarkdownMenu.
GitHub: sky-y/MarkdownMenu

Thanks to Luke, I wrote another script of MarkdownMenu in a bat file and uploaded to GitHub.
I checked it on Windows 8.

I removed Markdown to PDF because I thought installing LaTeX is too difficult for Japanese beginner users (pdfTeX cannot generate Japanese).

hahaha so many nice things here (as usual). Scrivener is a good ‘un for bare bones wording. Although I just had a look at the latest version and there seem to be buttons up there(!). I’m a Mac person so I use Pages (it’s not great) for work/ Uni as it works well with Endnote. Totally agree with you on people sticking with Word (and everything else associated with that thing-i.e. Office) for no other reason but laziness.. So many other cool things I wanted to discuss (including stuff in the comments but it’s late now so I’m off).

might be interesting for some here…
i wrote me some small bash-script that displays markdown via html
i use it to monitor output in one dtvm-pane, while i write with vim in another

https://gist.github.com/3010621

@ST/op, @Kris:
Pandoc can read several formats: Markdown, RST, Textile and subsets of HTML and
LaTeX. It can write many more formats than it can read. Actually the .doc
that it writes looks like stripped-down HTML but it seems that MS-Word is happy
with it. In between sits what is called “native format”: everything goes
input-native-output. More readers and writers get added every now and then.

Pandoc’s Markdown has been extended so that almost anything that native format
can accommodate can be represented in Pandoc-Markdown, but the way I test
whether my favourite feature is present is to use the export-to-HTML option of
Word (or whatever) shove that through Pandoc with HTML output, and compare the
two HTML versions in my browser. In many cases the HTML output can also make
an acceptable PDF, especially if you have installed wkhtmltopdf.

But for really nice PDFs, whether via TeX or via HTML, you will need a style
file (.sty for LaTeX, .css for HTML) that you have customized to your own
needs.

I’ve been considering MultiMarkdown for a large 400 page document but like @Greg I also have concerns with the numerous sections and chapters the document has. How are complex documents usually handled with markdown. What about ToCs?

I was thinking maybe tracking revisions with a git repo?

@ Greg:
You may want to try reStructuredText or MultiMarkdown for more advanced markup, like footnotes, citations, etc.
The reText editor has support for (basic) Markdown and reStructuredText.

I am actually quite used to writing on the Windows Notepad. But I think I’ll try this markdown thing. Thing is, I write mostly poems, and I do not use bold or italicized words on them. Perhaps I should.