Import and Export Markdown in Google Docs

Hey 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...

No 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.

For Google Docs like real time collab on native markdown, I like and use daily:

* https://hackmd.io

and

* https://stash.new

My 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.

i hope they'll eventually support 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)

In 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

[1] https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/docs_to_mar...

If 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.

This 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

Does 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?

Whoa, 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!

OT: 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

I 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.

So close. I have always hoped for an edit in markdown (or limited formatting) mode.

This 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.

This 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.

I 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.

Is there an API to export a Google doc as markdown?

I 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?

I would imagine that requests for this feature went way up as ChatGPT has popularized.

Interesting 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.

LibreOffice has an open issue requesting Markdown export support:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160734

This 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.

Moved to self hosted bookstack recently due to this feature missing

Great 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!

This 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.

Finally they realized too many people were copying information from chatgpt and claude and didn't like seeing #####

I don't see any mention of table support. That will be the first thing I try, I hope it works... if not now, eventually.

I 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?

Good ! 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.

markdown 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.

Is this CommonMark, or a different flavour of Markdown?

So, can we now write a plugin for Obsidian that syncs changes to Google Drive?

when did google become sooo sloooow implementing trivial features, and then not even shipping a complete set of markdown?!