should we switch to .md from .Rmd for the ACC form

[paciorek]

For the Rmd version of the ACC form, we (briefly) discussed switching to .md during a recent AER monthly meeting, since there are no code chunks.

I like this idea in general, but when I looked into it more, I ran into the following.
RStudio won't recognize .md files when one tries to open script files. So an R-based user who tries to load the ACC form into RStudio will hit a roadblock. (That said, rmarkdown::render works fine on .md files.) Given many/most of our users are R-based, this seems suboptimal; we'd have to give more instructions on how to render the .md file. Rendering using pandoc and quarto are options, but many users may not have them installed on their system and/or know how to use them.

We could provide .md, .Rmd, and .qmd versions of the form. This has some appeal, but the content of the files would be almost identical except that the preface yaml for each needs to be a bit different (see below). Having duplicated content that we need to change in tandem when we update the form is not appealing.

Any thoughts welcome.

Side notes:

The preface for .qmd should be:

---
title: "Author Contributions Checklist Form"
date: "Revision: 2021-10-30"
format:
  pdf: default
---

The preface for .md should be:

---
title: "Author Contributions Checklist Form"
date: "Revision: 2021-10-30"
geometry: margin=1in
---