We’ve shown you the wonders of Markdown as great for your to-do lists and notes. If you love Markdown too but you’re stuck with a bunch of Google docs that aren’t in the format (but need to be), this Google Apps Script converts them instantly.
The script, available at GitHub by Renato Mangini, is easy to use, works like a charm, and you can save it in Google Drive so you can use it over and over, anytime you need to convert a document to Markdown.
via Lifehacker.com: This Script Converts Google Documents to Markdown for Easy Exporting.
Now this is intriguing. Markdown is a fine basic text markup language that is great for simple standalone documents1» . I’m certainly one of those folks who often feels like I’m stuck with using Google Docs and then find myself needing to use that info elsewhere. Good luck.
I’ve followed the instructions in the article to add this script to Google Drive and it seems to work well on things like meeting notes and outlines. For more complex documents like a functional specification for a Drupal 7 website under development, the results are a bit more mixed. It certainly converts the document to markdown and it retains most of the general formatting, but the detail formatting is lost. it does do a great job at extracting images.
Overall I’d say this a useful tool for liberating basic documents from Google Drive. For more complex documents, I’m waiting for the version that converts to AsciiDoc.