I have become a huge fan of Pandoc for converting Markdown to LaTeX code. It’s especially useful for outline-heavy text because it lets me avoid the more cumbersome itemize and enumerate environments in LaTeX during the writing process.

My Markdown to LaTeX workflow has gone through several refinements and is now as efficient as ever. I simply write a block of text in Markdown, copy it, and run a Terminal command:

pbpaste | pandoc -f markdown -t latex | sed -e 's/\\tightlist//'  | pbcopy

This command sends my clipboard contents to pandoc, which converts the Markdown to LaTeX. It then pipes the pandoc result to a sed command, which removes the \tightlist command from the LaTeX code produced by pandoc since I have no use for it in my final code. The final result ends up back on my clipboard via the final pbcopy command so that I can just paste it anywhere—often right on top of the Markdown I originally copied.

I usually run short Terminal commands like this by turning them into plain text TextExpander snippets and running them through Alfred preceded by >. There are arguably better ways of doing this.