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Import and Export Markdown in Google Docs
- tekknolagi 2y agoI thought copy as MD existed years ago and then went to look for it recently and it was gone. Now it's back. Am I losing it?
- cpswan 2y agoMaybe you've been using the GD2md-html plugin. I've certainly found it useful over the years, and will likely still use it for some of my workflows. https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/docs_to_markdown/700168918607 https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/docs_to_markdow...
- tekknolagi 2y agoI don't think so... It was part of the download menu for me
- stevemk14ebr 2y agoThere was partial markdown support (and still is) in gDocs today. AFAIK copy as MD was never supported. But this new feature is full round tripping into and out of gDocs as native markdown.
- CityOfThrowaway 2y agoMy guess is that this is strongly motivated by the success of LLMs. The lack of MD support makes manual IO from Docs to your favorite LLM lossy (or very annoying). Cool that it's fixed.
- thallavajhula 2y agoAt this point, most major changes could be motivated by LLMs/AI.
- staticman2 2y agoThey also already have to support Gemini to Google Docs and vice versa so it makes sense they'd have to support Markdown in some fashion on the backend.
- bomewish 2y agoIf this is implemented properly it’ll be a game changer for collaboration on papers. Means one can write a paper with colleagues in markdown and then easily knit with pandoc/quarto. Cheaper than overleaf etc.
- gouggoug 2y agoI'll add that writing a paper might be better handled by a more feature-full format like Asciidoc.
- bt1a 2y agoWhy not a markdown doc + git with each colleague using their own text editor/IDE of choice?
- KeplerBoy 2y agoBecause not everyone is interested in setting up a Pandoc/Latex toolchain. Overleaf almost solved this problem but they don't support Pandoc as a frontend and want money unless you self-host.
- prmoustache 2y agoYou don't need pandoc and even less a latex(WTF does it have to do with md???) toolchain to work with markdown documents.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoSorry, I was talking about scientific writing, where you have to be able to produce PDF artefacts. Writing in markdown and converting to .tex is actually a quite popular way of doing that these days.
- crazygringo 2y agoBecause in my experience, the value of collaboration tools isn't versioning -- going back to an older version rarely happens. It's the suggested edits combined with comments sidebar right there in the document, where you can have whole back-and-forth asynchronous discussions. There's no obvious/easy way to have comment threads in markdown or in git. And while you could, in theory, implement suggested edits as commits on a separate branch waiting to be merged in, the workflow for that would be pretty horrible -- are you going to create a separate branch and commit for every single edit? Since small edits are generally individually accepted, rejected, or further modified.
- yosito 2y agoI don't really use Google products, so I find this particularly useful for collaborating with people who do. I can do my shit in Markdown, they can do their shit in Google, and we can easily transfer the content back and forth.
- Freak_NL 2y agoNo support for code blocks still: ```java String x = "xxx"; ``` No quoting: The docs for `libfloof` state: > The floof is 4 bytes long, at most. And when I type `code` with backticks at the start of a line, the word 'code' is formatted as code as expected, but auto-correct automatically capitalises it to 'Code' — which should never be done with code fragments. So this is basically just headings, italics, bold, and links? It's really annoying when you need to share technical documentation with lots of code and code-like content with people and they've started doing the spec in Google Drive. Just give me working Markdown.
- ggm 2y agoWe just have to iterate in the "markdown support feedback/help" pulldown I guess. because without ```code``` it's not useful. Looking at you HN... (ok at least we have 2 indents codeblock)
- hnarn 2y agoWhat would ``` add that you can't already do with two indents? Beyond that, I think support for ```sh type highlighting would be awful, one of the best things about HN is how clean it is, I'd hate to see syntax highlighting or pictures or whatever when scrolling.
- promiseofbeans 2y agoIt would let you paste a lot of existing markdown into google docs
- Freak_NL 2y agoThey meant here on HackerNews. The only thing I really miss sometimes is a way to quote without resorting to indented code blocks. > Just a tiny hint that any paragraph like this starting with a greater-than sign is a quote.
- codetrotter 2y ago
- sgt 2y agoThis is great, the other day I had to export to HTML from Google Docs and then import the HTML into some kind of Markdown generator. The result was mediocre, but usable.
- eskibars 2y agoThis would have been very useful at several companies I worked at as a product manager for release blogs. I always start editing in gdocs because it's so much easier to collaborate on than any blog platform, but then you always need to copy/paste the content once final into the blog and nearly every time, it copies some elements of formatting into the rich HTML editor I don't want (fonts, font sizes, etc) while I do want some things (headings, bold, italics). It's usually easy to import markdown to blogs or trivial to convert it to stripped-down HTML that can be imported. One of the teams I worked on built a simple gdoc script to do this
- hu3 2y agoIndeed, very useful to unite markdown with the omnipresence of gdocs. One tip for pasting without formating, at least in Windows, is CTRL+SHIFT+V.
- gempir 2y agoDoes this just import Markdowns and convert them to Gdoc and then you export it finally. Or can you collaborate on Markdowns in real time? Could you build a confluence/wiki like system on top of this?
- red_admiral 2y agoThis is a cool feature, even if parts of markdown still need to be implemented (for pedants: commonmark). Meanwhile, Trello is once again threatening to force everyone onto the new rich-text editor and disable the old markdown one.
- dazzaji 2y agoFor Google Docs like real time collab on native markdown, I like and use daily: * https://hackmd.io https://hackmd.io and * https://stash.new https://stash.new
- dotancohen 2y agoW Google docs Writer Competitors
- mcbetz 2y agoI used Hackmd in the past to share the draft of my book (1) and liked that people don't need to have an account to comment. Google Docs was no option as no markdown support and account required. The process worked well but I found Hackmd too expensive for just getting feedback. Stash looks promising for this use case. (1) Written fully in Markdown in Obsidian at this point. I moved to Asciidoc since because of formatting. The early draft is still available on Hackmd though. Details in my bio.
- ZeWaka 2y agoWe've used HackMD in my OSS project since Google Docs was failing us as far as version control goes. What's great is that you can sync a HackMD document to GitHub or similar, so you can collaborate on a document and then push it to a repo.
- guytv 2y agowhen did google become sooo sloooow implementing trivial features, and then not even shipping a complete set of markdown?!
- worldwidelies 2y ago[dead]
- EE84M3i 2y ago> trivial features Four features were announced: 1. Convert Markdown to Docs content on paste 2. Copy Docs content as Markdown 3. Export a Doc as Markdown (from File > Download) 4. Import Markdown as a Doc (from File > Open or "Open with Google Docs" from Drive) Which of these do you see as trivial? These all seem quite complex to me with many edge cases , incompatibilities and ambiguities, especially if there's an expectation that you can round trip losslessly.
- guytv 2y agoAll of them. It should have been implemented years ago. Using GDocs after using notion for a few weeks feels like going back in time.
- flakiness 2y agoNotion is one of the best things that happened to Google Docs. It creates competition and Google Docs has get better since. Even though Notion is now better on many fronts as you said, people who have to stick to Google Docs benefit from Notion's existence in that way.
- Crier1002 2y agoi hope they'll eventually support Mermaid (https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid) for creating diagrams directly within documents. i've been using it a lot for my markdown files and it works amazingly well with LLMs (e.g. asking LLM to generate the diagram representation of something using Mermaidjs)
- asah 2y ago+1 mermaid please !!!!
- jfoster 2y agoInteresting announcement. Feels like some of it is just copy-pasted from a PRD. Not necessarily a bad thing (it's clearer than press release style), just the first time I've noticed it in a "bigtech" announcement.
- worldmerge 2y agoThis is really useful! Hope they continue to add features. I don’t like directly writing markdown and would rather use a text editor like Docs or Word.
- sheremetyev 2y agoYou are not alone :) For Microsoft Word you might find Writage plugin useful (https://www.writage.com https://www.writage.com) - supports all basic Markdown syntax, tables etc. and recently added support for math formulas.
- orliesaurus 2y agoI guess most users of Google Docs have no use for this, especially the download as markdown. I wonder why they decided to add this feature for the tech crowd so late in the lifecycle of the product, feels almost like an Summer '24 intern project?
- vitus 2y agoAgreed; given the timing, an intern project seems plausible. (It feels a bit more ambitious than a typical intern project though, and I'm not sure how many of those end up quite so user-facing.) I can imagine one internal use case. At Google, we use Google Docs heavily for design docs. After the system has been built, it's not uncommon to link to the design doc as supplementary reading material. But the design doc isn't intended to co-evolve with the system; at some point, we migrate the design details to our internal documentation pages (g3doc [0]), which serves version-controlled markdown files and often has a much lower barrier to entry. Even though Google Docs is ostensibly collaborative, design docs are often used as a snapshot of an individual's engineering maturity as justification during performance evaluation and promotion, and so it's not typical for them to be updated substantially, years after the initial implementation is complete. [0] We write about it briefly in a case study about "The Google Wiki" at https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch10.html https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch10.html
- zenbowman 2y ago100%. I do this all the time, this will be very useful internally.
- remoquete 2y agoCollaborative editing of Markdown docs in GitHub / GitLab can be a pain. This is a huge game changer for technical writers. Admittedly not the biggest crowd, but hey...
- crazygringo 2y agoSpeaking as someone with experience in enterprise software, I'd say there's a good chance it's because one or more large corporations were ready to migrate from MS Office to Google Workspace but that not having Markdown import/export would be a deal-breaker. A lot of times when you wonder, "why did they add that feature?", that's why. A single large potential customer absolutely needed it because of whatever critical internal business processes they happen to have. It's a major difference from software sold to consumers, where the aggregate consumer demand for a feature is generally more obvious/intuitive/explainable.
- xnx 2y agoSo close. I have always hoped for an edit in markdown (or limited formatting) mode.
- sanjeevmsk 2y agoMoved to self hosted bookstack recently due to this feature missing
- d4rkp4ttern 2y agoI like to have AI auto-complete assistance from something like GitHub copilot, so I often compose markdown within PyCharm and then paste to Google docs. There seem to be zillions of “AI-writing” tools out there but I’m shocked that nothing has replaced the smooth functionality of GitHub copilot. Google docs with Gemini is not smooth at all. Tried obsidian plugins but they are janky.
- tomeraberbach 2y agoHey folks, I'm the engineer who implemented the new feature. Just clearing up some confusion. A lot of you are noticing the preexisting automatic detection feature from 2022 [1], which I also worked on. That's NOT what this newly announced feature is. The new feature supports full import/export, but it's still rolling out so you're likely not seeing it yet! Hope you like it once it reaches you :) [1] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/03/compose-with-markdown-in-google-docs-on.html?m=1 https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/03/compose-with...
- chrisbrandow 2y agoAny idea how long is this rollout going to be? I still don't have access to it. (not that you're in charge of the rollout pace)
- tomeraberbach 2y agoShould be rolled out to everyone by sometime next week See this heading: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/07/import-and-export-markdown-in-google-docs.html#:~:text=Slides%2C%20%26%20Drawings.-,Rollout%20pace,-Rapid%20Release%20and https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/07/import-and-e...
- remoquete 2y agoSuch a huge quality of life improvement for technical writers who rely on Gsuite collaboration features while editing Markdown docs. Thank you!
- zameerb1 2y ago[dead]
- jcastro 2y agoThis is going to save me so much time, thank you for this!
- sbergot 2y agoThank you for making that! I was using a plugin to export to markdown but it wasn't ideal.
- mikelnrd 2y agoIs there an API to export a Google doc as markdown?
- stevemk14ebr 2y agoYes, and to import. You mess with the mime types when creating a document or exporting and the conversion operation happens. Standard gdocs APIs cover conversion of formats already with doc files as an example.
- neontomo 2y agomarkdown is such an elegant markup implementation, i remember using bbcode on online forums which was ok but markdown i use all the time to keep notes and organise my thoughts. when i do consulting i summarise my work in a github gist. look forward to trying this.
- einpoklum 2y agoLibreOffice has an open issue requesting Markdown export support: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160734 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160734
- dalrympm 2y agoI don't see any mention of table support. That will be the first thing I try, I hope it works... if not now, eventually.
- stevemk14ebr 2y agoThey are supported (source: beta tested it internally). We use this markdown feature for some internal workflows where github flavor markdown syntax is used. We've tested this works and ourselves rely on it as well as some other markdown extensions.
- yboris 2y agoIn the past I used the Docs to Markdown add-on that has worked well [1] Google Docs -> Markdown -> Hugo website was a great workflow: https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net https://github.com/whyboris/utilitarianism.net [1] https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/docs_to_markdown/700168918607 https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/docs_to_mar...
- mavsman 2y agoI would imagine that requests for this feature went way up as ChatGPT has popularized.
- esprehn 2y agoThis is a great feature (and probably related to reliance on markdown from all the LLM services). I do wish they'd add SVG import to slides though, that's been a top feature request for like a decade.
- tiffanyh 2y agoOT: Has anyone noticed performance improvements since Google migrated Docs away from using DOM, and over to using Canvas? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858
- bapetel 2y agoGood ! I use notion and sometimes when i copy a text from notion to docs, i have to format it again. Now i would not do it.
- wscott 2y agoSo, can we now write a plugin for Obsidian that syncs changes to Google Drive?
- amaldavid 2y agoFinally they realized too many people were copying information from chatgpt and claude and didn't like seeing #####
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- flakiness 2y agoGreat job! I hope the "new tab experience" is rolled out to non-workspace users too. The tab + markdown export combination would make Google Docs a great blog editor!
- freedomben 2y agoWhoa, this is a huge, huge deal for me. This is going to make Google Docs incredibly more useful, and will provide some functionality that I've currently been working around using vim block editing and macros (hey now, vim mode is a great next project for google docs :-D). Ability to import/export as markdown will also be a game changer for less technical people who want to contribute to technical documentation. I strongly prefer technical docs to be in markdown and under version control, and that makes it hard for people. This doesn't solve the git learning curve of course, but that part is pretty manageable. Thank you to the people who made this happen! May you continue your great work for a long time to come!
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoIs this CommonMark, or a different flavour of Markdown?
- gjsgdj 2y ago[flagged]