cool tools: Docs to Markdown

[Joe Corneli]

Hi all,

I installed the _Docs to Markdown_ Add-On for Google Docs. It works surprisingly well!

Here is a conversion of the Greatest Flops paper to Markdown.

https://hackmd.io/@holtzermann17/SknLt64IU/edit

It was a pretty complicated document but seems to require only minimal cleanup.  I'll be working on the document today... probably converting from the Markdown version to Org Mode, to more easily refactor it in Emacs.  Anyway:

The docs for the plugin are here: https://github.com/evbacher/gd2md-html/wiki

This is still just a manual export.  If we could automatically ROUND TRIP documents between Google Docs and Markdown that would be super awesome.  That sounds like a gnarly technical project, but it would be something that I'm sure others would find useful.  I don't think there are plugins that do all of this yet?

The cycle would look like this:

- Edit anywhere (Google Docs, Floobits, Github, pull request)

- Changes propagate either as character-level streams or as commits

- Commit to master causes all these 'heads' to sync automatically

- Regenerate downstream versions (EPUB, Tufte CSS, LaTeX) automatically

That would have clear advantages over our current workflow but it also sounds like a lot of work to set up.  But, time permitting, we might work on this.

Joe