Markdown

[JHilker]

I've been thinking about how we're rendering documents (excluding PDFs). If we are going to migrate to editing documents, we'll want to do so with a markdown editor like stackedit.io.

Given that direction, it may make sense to begin converting HTML for editable documents (.doc, .docx, etc.) to markdown now. I've found an open source client-side library that renders markdown to html on-the-fly, so we'd only have to store markdown in our database:

https://github.com/chjj/marked

• on-the-fly rendering markdown to html client-side

https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js

• HTML to markdown conversion

I feel like Markdown could provide us with these distinct advantages: More standard output of documents Fixing our indent issue Allow us to display content in a div or span rather than iFrame I'm sure there will be drawbacks and difficulties to this move. If any come to mind, please let me know.

PS - Aaron Swartz also wrote a library for converting HTML to markdown. It's here:

https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text

It looks like there are a number of forks that have continued to improve, but since he passed, the updates haven't gotten merged to Master.

[btbonval]

Related to #272

[JHilker]

https://github.com/mangini/gdocs2md

[charlesconnell]

@JHilker You can close this if you're comfortable with it.