I want to collaborate with people on Markdown based writing. Google Docs is a great collaborative writing environment. But it keeps adding formatting when I don’t want it to, so how can I use it to edit markdown. In this post I will tell you how to do that.

Cutting to the chase: type in your markdown and press ctrl+z everytime Google Doc adds formatting, save as .txt

Markdown is a text based writing markup language, which you feed into other programs to convert to pdf, html, slides, etc.

I use it all the time. Running the Markdown through Marp to create slides, Dillinger.io for adhoc documents, and Pandoc for more formal documents.

I mainly use a subset of markdown.

When I am creating slides I only really use the following constructs

<!--

This is a comment and not displayed.

-->

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

### Heading 3

* bulleted list item 1
* bulleted list item 2

---

# Three lines above is a slide break

[Visit Talotics.com](https://talotics.com)

![](/images/thisisapng.png)

---

# Last Slide

**Bold Text**

_Italics Text_

Google Docs Does Not Support Markdown

If Google docs can allow me to create the above then I would be fine.

There are Chrome plugins that claim to help with this. But I really want a no-addon approach.

What are the Google Docs Output options?

The following options look most promising.

• Web Page (.html, zipped)
• Plain text (.txt)

What happens if I create a doc and export as html?

I created a Google Doc - formatted as though it was the Markdown rendering.

I exported the .html as a zip from Google Docs.

I tried to use online services to convert HTML to Markdown.

It didn’t completely work.

• Dillinger.io
  • links are Googlised
  • bold and italics are missing
  • no image marker

Bonus: I learned that a horizontal line is also *** and not just ---

What happens if I create a doc and export as text?

Using the same Google Doc, I tried to export as text.

What works?

• horizontal lines
• links that are .com
• bulleted lists

Nothing else.

It can be done - copy and paste from another editor

But that defeats the point

Type it in as Markdown and save as .txt

The biggest pain of using Google Docs as a Markdown editor is the continual reformatting of what you type into formatted text. But if you get used to typing ctrl+z every time this happens then you will be fine. I experience a similar problem when I type Markdown directly into Evernote, although it doesn’t reformat the text quite as much.

• headings types fine

• bullets auto convert into bullets
  • this exports OK
  • or ctrl+z to remove formatting
• images you will have to export as html
  • save as zipped html and find the images
  • publish as html and save the images
• bold works fine
• underscore works fine
• end comments converts into a unicode graphic - cntrl+z fixes it

Save as .txt.

How to check?

• Paste the contents of .txt into Dillinger.io.
• Open the .txt file into Dillinger.io.
• Open the .txt file in Marp

Since I’m collaborating on a set of slides. Opening in Marp is my preferred option since I can see the actual slides generated.

It is Possible to use Google Docs as a Markdown editor

It is possible to use Google Docs as a markdown editor, just remember to use ctrl+z a lot.

I’m collaborating with someone who does not really know Markdown. So at the start of our shared Google Doc I have a comment which has these instructions in it.

You just have to take a little care. And since you get to edit as you share. That’s a price that seems fair.