Such a huge quality of life improvement for technical writers who rely on Gsuite collaboration features while editing Markdown docs. Thank you!

This is going to save me so much time, thank you for this!

Thank you for making that! I was using a plugin to export to markdown but it wasn't ideal.

Thank you! This is going to make my life MUCH easier

Is it also supported in the Google Drive export API? It's not in the docs yet at least. https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/ref-export-fo...

Yes, it will be supported by this API! I actually wasn't aware of this documentation page. I'll make sure it gets updated. Thanks for flagging

Oh that’s great. Does that mean Google drive will have good markdown previews now?

No, this feature doesn't affect the preview. We don't convert a Markdown file to a Doc unless a user initiates it

Should be updated now

I would like to be able to open and edit .md files in Google Docs on desktop and mobile like how Google Docs supports opening .docx files

Is it possible to get this feature in Slides as well?

I often need to prepare technical slides with code in it, and being able to just backtick away into a <code> tag or a <pre> block would be a godsend.

Not sure if you have the patience to use a beta product, but I recently started adding slideshows to Scroll.

This source code: http://hub.scroll.pub/slideshowdemo/index.scroll

Produces this HTML: http://hub.scroll.pub/slideshowdemo/

Not an answer to your question because this isn't integrated with Slides, but Slidev[0] can be used for creating slidedecks in Markdown

[0]: https://github.com/slidevjs/slidev

Thanks for doing this! It’s amazing feature to use docs to compose and paste to my Hugo blog. Very good workflow

Question: when coming up with tests (whatever level they might be) before you submit your code, what’s your thought process about what tests to include? What edge cases to handle? What to not test? Is there much disagreement about what to test?

We did indeed write A LOT of tests!

I would say there wasn't much disagreement there. I typically started out by writing tests for the simple cases, then I would identify edge cases through actual usage of the feature locally, and write tests for those as well. Also, whenever bugs were found, I would write "regression test cases" for those when fixing.

Google keep…

I would have expected this to export CommonMark, but it seems like it's not quite up to that yet. Is that on the board for a future release?

This isn't to say I prefer CM -- because Markdown came into being from Gruber's script. In a literal sense, "Markdown" is defined as whatever `markdown.pl` is, warts and all -- however, contact with the outside world forced things to move in a direction that is (so to speak) more organized that what John originally wrote.

The export part of the feature does support everything that CommonMark does! Curious what gave you the impression that it doesn't?

Admittedly, I didn't spend more than 5-10 minutes looking through the specs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The existence of comments about how certain elements were rendered on export made me think that something was missing when compared with CM.

Will the API support uploading conversion of markdown to "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document"? I process thousands of documents each month -- often have to parse from HTML to Markdown to Docx then finally upload and convert to Google Doc format.

It will support importing Markdown as a Google Doc.

I won't support directly importing Markdown as DOCX. For that you could convert from Markdown to Docs to DOCX though.

Check out Pandoc.

I can't wait.

This will make a huge difference to a lot of my work.

The main effect of slow rollouts on me is that I never use the feature. It goes like this.

1. There's a service I use sporadically or used to use

2. They announce a new feature that might potentially mean I'll start using it again/more

3. I read the post, log in and realise I don't have access yet

4. I completely forget this ever happened.

Surely all the effort that goes into announcing these things is a bit wasted ?

What happened to the a nice "Labs" switch to opt into stuff that's new and a bit raw?

The purpose of the announcements is for career advancement within Google. Actual impact to end users is not terribly relevant to that.

I can't speak to the reasoning for announcing before 100% rollout, but I can say that the slow rollout is for safety. That way if there's a severe bug, then we can catch it while it affects a small number of users, instead of all users.

Labs is more for experimental features that needs more beta testing before rolling out to everyone, rather than being the "first stage" of slow rollout.

I wish we could opt-in to get early access in the slow rollout. That way you get the enthousiastic users to promote the incoming feature and you get some tech savvy people to test it before it reaches out more people.

That doesn't contradict the parent comment though. Engaged users should have an option somewhere to enable it, barely affecting the overall rollout.

It’s not about gating the new feature behind a flight, but not wanting to push a new build out to the furthest deployment ring before you need to.

It is a bit odd how they do it in Docs. In Cloud, announcements happen when the feature has already fully rolled out. Note, this is separate from region expansion, which might be delayed for some heavy-weight features (like new categories of VMs requiring special hardware.)

Not announcing a feature in a collaborative environment would likely cause a fair bit of confusion when only some people see it.

Docs is supposedly a collaborative environment; without collaborative features, you're better off going back to Microsoft Word.

At least it's available to paying customers, that's not always the case.

Would appreciate support for comments, with CriticMarkup or something.

Is this also available from the googlecloud APIs libraries? Would be neat to be able to create a Google Doc from markdown content, it's something we were going to look into for one of the things we are building.

This will be supported by the Drive APIs

How does it handle images in the imports and exports?

Import supports links via upload

Export outputs base64 encoded image URLs. We use Markdown reference links to place the large URLs out of the way of reading at the bottom of the file

When I export Markdown, the image reference is placed like `[image-1][base64-reference]`. However, the reference links should be `[image-1](base64-reference)`. The brackets for the reference should be parentheses, not square.

Any hint on why you have used square brackets?

Link _references_ must be enclosed in brackets. Only _inline_ link URLs use parentheses

See https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link

Thank you for your reply and sorry for my ignorance. I didn't look much about reference links before writing this.

No worries! Glad I could send some new knowledge your way :)

Can I sync MD files to drive through the osx drive integration? Allowing me to work on a local file in MD, but others can view through web

You are my hero.

I work at Google in open source so I am constantly converting Google Docs to Markdown to put them on GitHub and vice versa. This will save me a lot of effort.

Thank you from Leanpub!

Super cool. Well done! I've been wanting this for awhile; glad to see it.

Duuuuuuuuude, I was just thinking a few days ago: how come markdown isn't yet a thing in word editors?

Well, you solved it. Thanks!

Just for reference, Writage is a Word (Mac and Windows) add-in that exports and imports Markdown.

Hi, thanks for this amazing work.

Just curious: Google docs supports a lot more than what Markdown has syntaxes for - how do you deal with this when exporting to markdown?

We export to the closest available thing (e.g. file chips become links, people chips become mailto links, etc.) or drop the content entirely if there's truly nothing it can be converted to (rare case)

Thanks!

Google Colab also supports Markdown input cells as "Text" with a preview.

Does this work with Google Sites?

How to create a Google Sites page from a Markdown doc, with MyST Markdown YAML front matter

NotebookLM can generate Python, LaTeX, and Markdown.

How to Markdown and Git diff on a Chromebook without containers or Inspect Element because [...]

How to auto-grade Jupyter Notebooks with Markdown prose, with OtterGrader

How to build a jupyter-book from .rst, MyST Markdown .md, and .ipynb jupyter/nbformat notebooks containing MyST Markdown

The announcement of the new feature (which I don't have just yet) made me realize that the automatic detection feature existed, and I love it. :)

I just wanted to say, it took me a while to discover it (it happened by accident), but the preexisting feature from 2022 was a joy to discover! I didn't know you obviously, but I praised the kind anonymous soul out there who did that. I discovered it about 6 months ago, and I use it all the time now. I'm super excited to see it progress!

Any idea how long is this rollout going to be? I still don't have access to it. (not that you're in charge of the rollout pace)

Should be rolled out to everyone by sometime next week

See this heading: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/07/import-and-e...