POST
Google Classroom
Author: Alan Richardson
I want to collaborate with people on Markdown based writing. Google Docs is a great collaborative writing environment. But it keeps adding formatting when I don’t want it to, so how can I use it to edit markdown. In this post I will tell you how to do that.
Converts a markdown file to.docx and then imports it to Google Drive - timwis/markdown-to-google-doc. You can open a markdown file to edit from your Google Drive and computer. Supports Standard Markdown / CommonMark and GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown) View as markdown format, HTML format, styled. Markdown Documentation Files. A.MD or.MARKDOWN file might be a Markdown Documentation file. It's a plain text file that uses the Markdown language to describe how to format the document. README.md is a common MD file that holds text instructions.
Cutting to the chase: type in your markdown and press ctrl+z everytime Google Doc adds formatting, save as .txt
Markdown is a text based writing markup language, which you feed into other programs to convert to pdf, html, slides, etc.
I use it all the time. Running the Markdown through Marp to create slides, Dillinger.io for adhoc documents, and Pandoc for more formal documents.
I mainly use a subset of markdown.
When I am creating slides I only really use the following constructs
If Google docs can allow me to create the above then I would be fine.
There are Chrome plugins that claim to help with this. But I really want a no-addon approach.
What are the Google Docs Output options?
The following options look most promising.
Web Page (.html, zipped)Plain text (.txt)
What happens if I create a doc and export as html?
I created a Google Doc - formatted as though it was the Markdown rendering.
I exported the .html as a zip from Google Docs.
I tried to use online services to convert HTML to Markdown.
It didn’t completely work.
- Dillinger.io
- links are Googlised
- bold and italics are missing
- no image marker
Bonus: I learned that a horizontal line is also *** and not just ---
What happens if I create a doc and export as text?
Using the same Google Doc, I tried to export as text.
What works?
- horizontal lines
- links that are .com
- bulleted lists
Nothing else.
But that defeats the point
The biggest pain of using Google Docs as a Markdown editor is the continual reformatting of what you type into formatted text. But if you get used to typing ctrl+z every time this happens then you will be fine. I experience a similar problem when I type Markdown directly into Evernote, although it doesn’t reformat the text quite as much.
- bullets auto convert into bullets
- this exports OK
- or
ctrl+zto remove formatting
- images you will have to export as html
- save as zipped html and find the images
- publish as html and save the images
- bold works fine
- underscore works fine
- end comments converts into a unicode graphic -
cntrl+zfixes it
Save as .txt.
- Paste the contents of
.txtinto Dillinger.io. - Open the
.txtfile into Dillinger.io. - Open the
.txtfile in Marp
Since I’m collaborating on a set of slides. Opening in Marp is my preferred option since I can see the actual slides generated.
It is possible to use Google Docs as a markdown editor, just remember to use ctrl+z Hp laser jet p1102w software download for mac. a lot.
Google Drive Markdown Mac
I’m collaborating with someone who does not really know Markdown. So at the start of our shared Google Doc I have a comment which has these instructions in it.
You just have to take a little care. And since you get to edit as you share. That’s a price that seems fair.
- Related:
17.6 Collaborate on Rmd documents through Google Drive
Based on the googledrive package (D’Agostino McGowan and Bryan 2020), Emily Kothe provided a few wrapper functions in the rmdrive Acrobat adobe professional download for mac. package, which is currently available only on GitHub at https://github.com/ekothe/rmdrive. At the time of writing, it still lacks rich documentation, so I recommend that you try Janosch Linkersdörfer’s fork instead: https://github.com/januz/rmdrive (which is based on Ben Marwick’s fork—if you still have not learned GIT, you may be motivated by these examples of freely forking and improving other people’s GIT repositories).
The workflow with rmdrive is outlined below:
We assume there is a main author or contributor of the project, who is capable of using version control tools like GIT. The main author writes the initial version of the Rmd document, and uploads it to Google Drive via the
upload_rmd()function.The Rmd document in Google Drive is shared with other collaborators, who can make or suggest changes in Google Document.
The main author can accept suggested changes, and download/preview the Rmd document locally via
render_rmd(). Other collaborators can also do this by themselves if they have modified code chunks and want to see the new results.If satisfied, the main author can commit changes to the GIT repository.
Google Drive Markdown Download
The collaborative editing can be either synchronous or asynchronous in Google Drive. Multiple people can edit the same document at the same time, or wait for other people to finish their editing first.
Google Drive Markdown App
There is also a function udpate_rmd() in the package, which allows you to edit the Rmd document locally, and upload the local Rmd document to Google Drive. You probably should never want to run this function, because it will completely overwrite the document in Google Drive. The main author may want to warn collaborators about this in advance. Ideally, all collaborators should only edit the document in Google Drive and not locally. It is okay to preview the edited document locally via render_rmd(), though (note that render_rmd() automatically downloads the document before rendering it).