Writing a thesis in Markdown

Write your thesis in Markdown. Send your supervisor Word. Grasmere is a Mac app that takes a thesis or dissertation from your first source to the submitted PDF, in plain Markdown files, and brings your supervisor’s tracked changes back into your draft.

Download for macOS Free for 14 days, then $14.99 once · macOS 26+

Why Markdown suits a thesis

A thesis takes years, and it should outlive the software you wrote it in. Markdown files are plain text. They open in any editor, they’re small, and they can be backed up, compared and kept in git like any other file.

A thesis is also long. Written as one document it’s slow to find your way around. Written as a chapter a file, in a folder for each part, you only ever have the chapter you’re working on in front of you.

Thesis/
  chapters/
    1 Introduction.md
    2 Literature Review.md
    3 Methods.md
    4 Findings.md
    5 Discussion.md
  research/
    …a document for each source

“But my supervisor uses Word”

This is the usual reason people give up on Markdown, and it’s the thing Grasmere is built to answer.

  1. Send. Export a chapter, or the whole thesis, as a Word file from the Review screen.
  2. They review. In Word, Pages or Google Docs, with comments and tracked changes as usual. They don’t need Grasmere.
  3. Import. Drop the file back in. Each comment and change appears beside your text, ready to accept, reject or reply to.

Supervisors take weeks, and you’ll have kept writing. That’s allowed for. A change accepted into a paragraph you’ve since rewritten goes into your new version, and nothing changes in your Markdown until you say so. See Markdown to Word, and back again.

Your sources, and your Zotero library

Each project has a research folder. A paper’s PDF dropped into it becomes a source, looked up by its DOI. Web pages are saved as clean Markdown. Books are added by ISBN. If you’ve spent a year filling Zotero, export the library and import it, attachments and all.

Highlight as you read, in a PDF or a saved page, and the passages are kept in one document with links back to the page they came from.

Citations and the reference list

Type [@ to cite, and pick the source by author, title or year. When you export, citations and the reference list are written in APA 7, Harvard, Chicago author-date or MLA 9. If your department changes its mind, choose another style and every citation follows.

Footnotes are written as [^1]. They come out at the foot of the page in a PDF and as real footnotes in Word, numbered afresh in each chapter.

Keeping to the deadline

Give the thesis a word target and a submission date. The bar beneath the page says how far you’ve got, what you’ve written today and how many words a day would get you there.

On the Review stage each chapter is a card with a status, from Unwritten to Final, and a count of your supervisor’s comments still open.

Submitting

The Publish stage reads every chapter straight through and lays it out as pages before anything is made. Then it writes one of these.

  • A typeset PDF, with a title page, a contents page with page numbers, footnotes and the references after the last chapter.
  • One Word document, built with Word’s own heading styles, so it can take on your university’s formatting in Word.
  • New in 1.6. LaTeX, in a thesis template of Grasmere’s or your university’s own. See Using LaTeX with Markdown.

Two lines beneath the chapter list check what’s ready, such as broken links, citations that don’t resolve and chapters still in draft.

What to check before you commit

  • Your citation style. Grasmere writes four author-date styles. Numbered styles such as Vancouver and IEEE, and footnote styles such as OSCOLA, aren’t supported.
  • Your Mac. Grasmere needs macOS 26 or later, and there’s no iPad or Windows version.
  • Your subject. It suits theses that are mostly prose, as in the humanities and social sciences. For one that’s mostly equations, LaTeX is still the better tool.

Questions

Will my university accept a thesis written in Markdown?

They’ll never see the Markdown. You submit a PDF or a Word file, like everyone else.

Does my supervisor need to install anything?

No. They open a Word file in whatever they already use.

Is my thesis sent to an AI?

No. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you send it. The AI tools are optional, they use Apple’s on-device model by default, and they ask questions or answer from your own documents. They don’t write your thesis.

What does it cost?

It’s free for 14 days, then $14.99 once. There’s no subscription.

Write your thesis in Markdown.

Open a folder, write a chapter, and send it to your supervisor as Word. The trial is free for 14 days.

Download for macOS Free for 14 days, then $14.99 once · macOS 26+