CarlSinclair
commented
1 month ago The least breaking way I've found to export markdown is by copying it as markdown then manually removing all the \, >, and <. At least the links remain functionally intact.
What happened?
Copy as markdown
Since exporting as markdown is still paywalled (see #6292), copy as markdown is a satisfactory alternative. Problem is, it doesn't work correctly. It adds
\,<, and>, seemingly for escaping, which ultimately breaks the markdown formatting. Here's an example:becomes
The whole point of exporting/copying as markdown is to avoid having to manually go through the document again and reformat it using markdown. These extra characters mean I still have to do that, making it not very different from exporting/copying as regular text.
Copy/export as text
Speaking of text, that behaves very strangely. In instances where markdown has not been applied, it copies/exports it faithfully. But when it is applied, it seems to copy/export the rendered markdown, without the markdown formatting. For example:
becomes
Header
Links that have been rendered as markdown are copied as such:
becomes text[link]
Suggested solution
Personally, I don't think it's generally helpful or necessary to have markdown get rendered while you are typing. I feel it gets in the way and makes editing more difficult.
Joplin tackles this by offering a choice between 3 views: unrendered markdown, rendered markdown, and a side-by-side. In the unrendered view, markdown can be copied as is, which makes it work. This would fix many markdown related issues.
A simpler approach could be using unrendered markdown in edit mode, with a "preview" or "reading" button where you can see the rendered output. That's the most common implementation, even used here on GitHub. Google Docs does something similar by entering reading mode when you open a document, and editing it requires clicking the edit button to enter editing mode.
Steps to reproduce the problem
Copy as text Copy as markdown Export as markdown
Version
3.0.13-9019490-desktop
Platform/OS
Windows
Relevant log output