Joedang / gd2md

Convert Google Docs to Markdown

Tools for Converting Things on Google Drive to Markdown

Grab a bunch of document links from Google Drive and convert them to Markdown. You put a bunch of links in a file, run some make commands, check your results, and copy the Markdown files wherever you need them.

This is very similar to Goodls, except this uses more readily-available tools and is probably easier to break, lol.

Dependencies

• make
• Curl
  • It would be trivial to swap out curl for wget, if you wanted to.
• Bash
• Pandoc
• XeLaTeX
  • This is only for PDF previews.
  • Pandoc needs to know where XeLaTeX is.

How to Use

1. In Google Drive, go to the file you want to convert, right click it, and choose "Get shareable link".
   • You need the drive link, not the docs link. It should look like this: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1x9sxi3rikPEjh2--X68eALqWpuUHYNjM_IMc1kB4T58
   • It's okay to add a comment after the link as long as its separated from the ID with something that isn't a letter, number, dash, or underscore. So, for example, this would be fine:
     https://drive.google.com/open?id=1x9sxi3rikPEjh2--X68eALqWpuUHYNjM_IMc1kB4T58 # K-40 (Mini Laser) SOP (WIP)
   • You could technically just put "id=" followed by the file ID, since only strings of the above mentioned characters that follow "id=" are assumed to be Google Drive IDs, but let's not overcomplicate things </irony>.
2. Paste that link into SOPlinks.txt
3. In the docsSOPs directory run make download
   • scrapeDocs.sh will download all the links as DOCX files.
   • If Google doesn't know how to convert the requested file to DOCX, it'll give you an error.
   • The files will have the same name as in Google Drive, but problematic characters -- like spaces and parentheses -- will be removed.
   • Everything will go in downloads/
4. To convert the downloaded DOCX files to markdown, run make markdown
   • (Don't change into downloads.)
5. If you want to preview the converted files, run make pdf, go into the downloads/ directory and open them in whatever pdf viewer.
6. If the converted files look good, run make deploy to move them out of downloads/ into TOGO/.
   • Note, if files of the same names already exist in TOGO, this will overwrite the existing files. If you're worried about this, you can check git status to see if anything shows up as "modified" rather than "untracked".
7. Move the converted files (and their associated media) from TOGO/ to wherever you want them.
8. If you wish, run make clean to get rid of the stuff that was downloaded.
   • Deployed files will not be removed.