Synced blocks wrongly produce indented Markdown output

[smor]

Hello,

Thanks for the good work, this package is very useful to me !

General context

I'm trying to build a Notion to Hugo process using notion-to-md, which I simply called notion-to-hugo. I want to use it to build online courses in the most generic way I can, allowing content creators to leverage the full potential of Notion while ensuring that the final website works in our course setup.

I want to be able to customize the rendering process to be able to adapt the generated content for the particular Hugo settings that I use, including shortcodes for instance.

I use Notion Synced Block to reuse content across pages.

I started to work on a generic pre/post-processing pipeline here. I was very happy to see setCustomTransformer emerging, as I like the direction it's heading !

The issue

You can see that in this Notion page there is a Notion synced block. When processed with notion-to-md, the Markdown MdBlock output is the following :

    This block is shared with other pages and editing one changes all other instances.

    > 💡 This is a callout which turns into a `<div class="notices note"></div>` block.

As you can see, the content is indented, leading to the paragraph being converted as a code block by Hugo, which you can see here on the generated HTML page produced by notion-to-hugo through notion-to-md.

Analysis

The block structure produced by notion-to-md is the following :

  {
    "type": "synced_block",
    "parent": "",
    "children": [
      {
        "type": "paragraph",
        "parent": "This block is shared with other pages and editing one changes all other instances.",
        "children": []
      },
      {
        "type": "callout",
        "parent": "> 💡 This is a callout which turns into a `<div class=\"notices note\"></div>` block.",
        "children": []
      }
    ]
  }

We can see that the actual content blocks are children of the synced block. The synced block is only a container for actual content, and I don't see any reason why we should treat its children as real children.

The indent is made here :

      if (mdBlocks.parent) {
        if (
          mdBlocks.type !== "to_do" &&
          mdBlocks.type !== "bulleted_list_item" &&
          mdBlocks.type !== "numbered_list_item"
        ) {
          // add extra line breaks non list blocks
          mdString += `\n${md.addTabSpace(mdBlocks.parent, nestingLevel)}\n\n`;
        } else {
          mdString += `${md.addTabSpace(mdBlocks.parent, nestingLevel)}\n`;
        }
      }

My guess is that we should not addTabSpace to children of blocked whose type is synced_block.

Attempts at solving the issue

I tried the following things :

• remove the leading spaces in the generated md output with one of my own post-processor : I seem to lack information about the blocks if I plug it after generating the Markdown output ;
• use setCustomTransformer to deal with the particular case : I did not find a proper way to use it for my case ;
• fiddle with toMarkdownString to deal with synced_block : I can't get it to work as I could find no way of determining the parent's type here.

I'm feeling stuck, probably by my lack of understanding of some of the processing flows... Would you be able to help me sort it out ? I hope I provided enough information for that.

Thanks a lot !

[souvikinator]

Hi there. Thanks for reporting the issue and the PR #44 . For the time your PR will fix the issue so I'll merge it, however I believe this may be the issue with other blocks as well so I'll release a fix in coming days.

[smor]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick answer and merge ! I think that this would need to be investigated further as well.

Best regards

[souvikinator]

The fix is now live in v2.5.3. Thanks for the contribution :)

[souvikinator]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick answer and merge ! I think that this would need to be investigated further as well.

Best regards

yes, I'm on it.