Is there a program or workflow to convert .doc or .docx files to Markdown or similar text?
PS: Ideally, I would welcome the option that a specific font (e.g. consolas) in the MS Word document will be rendered to text-code: ```....```.
Pandoc supports conversion from docx to markdown directly:
pandoc -f docx -t markdown foo.docx -o foo.markdown
Several markdown formats are supported:
-t gfm (GitHub-Flavored Markdown)
-t markdown_mmd (MultiMarkdown)
-t markdown (pandoc’s extended Markdown)
-t markdown_strict (original unextended Markdown)
-t markdown_phpextra (PHP Markdown Extra)
-t commonmark (CommonMark Markdown)
docx -> markdown
Specifically regarding the question (docx --> markdown), use the Writeage plugin for Microsoft Word. It also works the other way round markdown --> docx.
More Options
Use a Conversion Tool for multi-file conversion.
Use a WYSIWYG Editor for single files and superior fonts.
Which Conversion Tools?
I've tested these three: (1) Pandoc (2) Mammoth (3) w2m
Pandoc
By far the superior tool for conversions with support for a multitude of file types (see Pandoc's man page for supported file types):
pandoc -f docx -t gfm somedoc.docx -o somedoc.md
NB
To get pandoc to export markdown tables ('pipe_tables' in pandoc) use multimarkdown or gfm output formats.
If formatting to PDF, pandoc uses LaTeX templates for this so you may need to install the LaTeX package for your OS if that command does not work out of the box. Instructions at LaTeX Installation
Which WYSIWYG Editors?
For docx, use Writeage.
Maintaining Superior Fonts
If you wish to preserve unicode characters, emojis and maintain superior fonts, you'll get some milage from the editors below when using copy-and-paste operations between file formats. Note, these do not read or write natively to docx.
Typora
iaWriter
Markdown Viewer for Chrome.
Programatic Equivalent
For a programatic equivalent, you might get some results by calling a different pdf-engine and their respective options but I haven't tested this. The pandoc defaults to 'pdflatex'.
pandoc --pdf-engine=
pandoc --pdf-engine-opt=STRING
Update: A4 vs US Letter
For outside the US, set the geometry variable:
pandoc -s -V geometry:a4paper -o outfile.pdf infile.md
Footnote
Its worth mentioning here - what's not obvious when discovering Markdown is that MultiMarkdown is by far the most feature rich markdown format.
MultiMarkdown supports amongst other things - metadata, table of contents, footnotes, maths, tables and YAML.
But Github's default format uses gfm which also supports tables. I use gfm for Github/GitLab and MultiMarkdown for everything else.
Given that you asked this question on stackoverflow you're probably wanting a programmatic or command line solution for which I've included another answer.
However, an alternative solution might be to use the Writage Markdown plugin for Microsoft Word.
Writage turns Word into your Markdown WYSIWYG editor, so you will be able to open a Markdown file and edit it like you normally edit any document in Microsoft Word. Also it will be possible to save your Word document as a Markdown file without any other converters.
Under the covers, Writage uses Pandoc that you'll also need to install for this plugin to work.
It currently supports the following Markdown elements:
Headings
Lists (numbered and bulleted)
Links
Font styles such as bold, italic
Tables
Footnotes
This might be the ideal solution for many end users as they won't need to install or run any command line tools - but rather just stick with what they are most familiar.
Mammoth is best known as a Word to HTML converter but it now supports a Markdown writer module. When I last checked, Mammoth Markdown support was still in its early stages, so you may find some features are unsupported. As usual ... check the website for the latest details.
Install
To use the Javascript version ... install NodeJS and then install Mammoth:
npm install -g mammoth
Command line
Command line to convert a Word document to Markdown ...
mammoth document.docx --output-format=markdown
API
NodeJS API to convert to Markdown ...
var mammoth = require("mammoth");
mammoth.convertToMarkdown({path: "path/to/document.docx"});
Features:
Mammoth Markdown writer currently supports:
Lists (numbered and bulleted)
Links
Font styles such as bold, italic
Images
The Mammoth command line tools and API have been ported to several languages:
With NO Markdown (May 2016):
.NET
Java/JVM
Wordpress
With Markdown:
Javascript
Python
You can use Word to Markdown (Ruby Gem) to convert it in one step. Conversion can be as simple as:
$ gem install word-to-markdown
$ w2m path/to/document.docx
It routes the document through LibreOffice, but also does it best to semantice headings based on their relative font size.
There's also a hosted version which would be as simple as drag-and-drop to convert.
Word to Markdown might be worth a shot, or the procedure described here using Calibre and Pandoc via HTMLZ, here's a bash script they use:
#!/bin/bash
mkdir temp
cp $1 temp
cd temp
ebook-convert $1 output.htmlz
unzip output.htmlz
cd ..
pandoc -f html -t markdown -o output.md temp/index.html
rm -R temp
From here:
unoconv -f html test.docx
pandoc -f html -t markdown -o test.md test.html
You can convert Word documents from within MS Word to Markdown using this Visual Basic Script:
https://gist.github.com/hawkrives/2305254
Follow the instructions under "To use the code" to create a new Macro in Word.
Note: This converts the currently open Word document ato Markdown, which removes all the Word formatting (headings, lists, etc.). First save the Word document you plan to converts, and then save the document again as a new document before running the macro. This way you can always go back to the original Word document to make changes.
There are more examples of Word to markdown VB scripts here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word_Macros
Here's an open-source web application built in Ruby to do this exact thing:
https://word2md.com
If you're using Linux, try Pandoc (first convert .doc/.docx into html with LibreOffice or something and then run it).
On Windows (or if Pandoc doesn't work), you can try this website (online demo, you can download it): Markdownify
For bulleted lists you can paste a list into Sublime Text and use multiselect ( tested ) or find and replace ( not tested ) to replace eg the proprietary MS Word characters with -, -- etc
This doesn't work with headings but it may be possible to use a similar technique with other elements.
For .doc Word files:
antiword -f some_file.doc
antiword's homepage: http://www.winfield.demon.nl/
Related
I have been trying to convert some of my Word documentation into some files suitable for an Azure Wiki. However, I haven't had much luck yet. I have tried converting the docx file to several different markdown formats, but none of them are exactly suitable for Azure DevOps.
By not being suitable for Azure DevOps Wiki, I mean, they don't look as good as on Azure DevOps Wiki, as they do in the original word document.
Some formats that I have tried converting my file into:
-t gfm (GitHub-Flavored Markdown)
-t markdown_mmd (MultiMarkdown)
-t markdown (pandoc’s extended Markdown)
-t markdown_strict (original unextended Markdown)
-t markdown_phpextra (PHP Markdown Extra)
-t commonmark (CommonMark Markdown)
Unless your Word documents are simple, you won't get parity. Wiki does not offer the rich formatting of MS Word. In a way, that's part of Wiki's value. You won't spend time futzing with formatting (ideally).
I "took a run at" this about a year ago and came to the same conclusion. You really can't get there - reliably. Fortunately, my volume was low, and I was able transfer my docs manually (copy/paste and format in Wiki markdown).
I need to convert the GitHub README.md file to pdf. I tried many modules, those are not working fine. Is there any new tool to get the exact pdf format. In this website is providing good conversion format of pdf. http://www.markdowntopdf.com/
I need command line tool like this format.
Try this software:
https://github.com/BlueHatbRit/mdpdf
Or explain what tools you've tried and why those are not working fine.
Also check this question on superuser:
https://superuser.com/questions/689056/how-can-i-convert-github-flavored-markdown-to-a-pdf
Pandoc
I've personally liked using pandoc as it support a wide range of input and output formats.
Installation
Pandoc is available in most repositories: sudo apt install pandoc
Usage
Sometimes, pandoc can tell the formats to use which makes converting easy. However, I find that this often interprets the input format as plain text which might not be what you want:
pandoc README.md -o README.pdf
Instead, you might want to be explicit about the input/output formats to ensure a better conversion. In the below case, I'm specifically claiming the README.md is in Github-Flavored Markdown:
pandoc --from=gfm --to=pdf -o README.pdf README.md
Again, there are quite a few different formats and options to choose from but to be honest, the basics suffice for the majority of my needs.
I found md-to-pdf very useful.
Examples:
– Convert ./file.md and save to ./file.pdf
$ md-to-pdf file.md
– Convert all markdown files in current directory
$ md-to-pdf ./*.md
– Convert all markdown files in current directory recursively
$ md-to-pdf ./**/*.md
– Convert and enable watch mode
$ md-to-pdf ./*.md -w
And many more options.
I need a huge natural text file for machine learning and Wikipedia dump is great for this purpose. So how can i download several gb of text in some language (non-eng) without xml tags (just content)?
You could grab a dump of all content of a Wikipedia of your choice from dumps.wikimedia.org. You will likely want one of the *wiki-20160501-pages-articles.xml files. Then, you could strip all XML tags from the dump using a tool like xmlstarlet:
xml sel -t -c "//text()" fywiki-20160501-pages-articles.xml > articles.txt
However, the text in a Wikipedia dump will be wiki markup, not natural text. You strip everything that's not alphanumeric with something like sed:
cat dump.txt | sed 's/\W/ /g'
This doesn't give you a clean corpus (for example, wikimarkup keywords and html entities will still be in your dump file) but it may be close enough for your purpose.
Phase a:
Go to dumps.wikimedia.org. Find a dump that fits your request. For machine learning - best way is to download "All pages, current versions only" dump of your language. Download and unzip it.
Phase b:
As the dump is xml file with a wiki-markup syntax of content - it has to be converted to plain text. The best solution i've found is to use this toolkit - https://github.com/yohasebe/wp2txt . It needs no much memory and works well.
Phase c:
wp2txt produces a hundreds of 10mb txt file, so we need to concatenate them. Use
cat * > all.txt
at nix systems or
cat dump.txt | sed 's/\W/ /g'
for windows one.
p.s. Also i've found better semi-legal solution for ML case. The solution is to download some huge txt-literature library. Have a nice learning!
for Python try this after downloading .xml dump
pip install wiki-dump-reader
https://pypi.org/project/wiki-dump-reader/
How can I convert a Google Docs, which contains images and tables, into a Markdown file which can be published as a post using Jekyll?
Is it possible to first export the Google Docs into a PDF and then convert the PDF to Markdown? What will happen to the images and tables in that case?
May 2018 Update
The script originally suggested in this answer appears to no longer work and has not been updated for 5 years.
An alternative solution (which is based on the old script) can be found at https://github.com/evbacher/gd2md-html
I tried it out, it works pretty well.
Previous Answer
You can use a Google Script to do the conversion for you!
This one will let you convert to .md and it will email you the converted file. I've tested it and works fine. It works with basic tables, and if you have images in the doc, it will attach them to the email.
Instructions for installing are on the same link, in the GitHub description, but I pasted it here for ease of access:
Add the script:
Open your Google Drive document (http://drive.google.com)
Tools ->
Script Manager > New
Select "Blank Project", then paste this code in
and save.
Clear the myFunction() default empty function and paste the
contents of converttomarkdown.gapps into the code editor
File -> Save
Run the script:
Tools > Script Manager
Select "ConvertToMarkdown" function.
Click Run
button (First run will require you to authorize it. Authorize and run
again)
Converted doc with images attached will be emailed to you.
Subject will be "[MARKDOWN_MAKER]...".
Good luck!
You can export as HTML. Jekyll can serve static HTML files.
Btw, "standard" markdown doesn't have tables. There are implementation that have it, but I'm afraid you'll have to convert them by hand to the right format, which will be implementation dependent. I don't know about Jekyll, maybe it's easiest to just use HTML tables within the markdown text.
You could create a new theme based on the HTML export. The export should contain the stylesheet embedded in a <style> tag within the HTML document. It's not really easy to create new themes, but doable. Or, if you just want the content and don't mind using whatever Jekyll theme you already have, then you can cut out the stylesheet part and keep the html only.
Another option would be to change how files are delimited in Excel on your computer. This guide can help you do that (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/21456/export-or-save-excel-files-with-pipe-or-other-delimiters-instead-of-commas/)
Then every time you copy and paste from excel to a markdown file/jekyll you automatically have the pipes. All you will need to do is add some dashes to separate your topline..
Google Docs -> docx to Markdown -> md
I myself looked far and wide but I believe the best way to do this is by using Pandoc.
Works for all platforms (check their incredible website ) , what you are looking for is the following command on your cmd or PowerShell (Windows) :
pandoc input_filename.docx -s -o output.md
Pro Tip:
Pandoc comes with a little trick to store up even all of the images in your document to your custom folder and then adding the image tags in the markdown by using relative referencing to those images at the correct places. The amazing line of code is:
pandoc --extract-media ./your_custom_folder input_filename.docx -o output_filename.md
I'm looking for a command line tool for Linux that will allow me to convert UTF-8 plain text files to various formats. My problem is that I'm working on a secure company-specific flavour of Linux, so the tool can't rely on other packages, such as Open Office, being present. Does anyone know of such a tool?
Gnu a2ps allows you convert from anything to postscript (designed for printing). Not exactly what you want but if you have utilites to display postscript files, you can convert them into pdf.
Another option is Gnu enscript which "converts text to Postscript, HTML or RTF with syntax highlighting". I'm not sure if it supports UTF-8.
Conversion into doc will be harder since it's a closed format. But I have in the past cheated by creating an HTML file with inline css and then renaming it to .doc. Worked back in the early 2000s. DOn't know about now.