Export in Markdown

[Tansy]

Can this version export the entire project in Markdown?

[Tim Green]

Can this version export the entire project in Markdown?

Help+Manual supports Markdown import but it will never support Markdown export, because it would not make any sense. Markdown is extremely minimalist and does not cover even a tiny fraction of Help+Manual's formatting or export capabilities.

[michal_novomesky]

Two available options based on Tim's answer:

1
- Publish as HTML.
- Use any free "HTML to Markdown" converter.

2
- Write / vibe-code a H&M XML to .md converter by yourself.

[Tim Green]

Update: We are actually reconsidering the question of Markdown export because there is now one very important genuine use case, which is providing data to AI systems. Markdown is currently the best format for inputting data into AI systems, so it would make sense to generate this from HM projects, despite the great loss of formatting and presentation features, which the AI systems don't need.

This being said, it's not a trivial undertaking. The data would have to be prepared, structured and tagged in a special way so that AI systems can "understand" it optimally, so it is definitely a long-term project.

[Andy Micone]

It is no doubt hard because people are, as always, busy reinventing the wheel, and there's no standardized format at all.

IMHO, some support would be useful not only for the AI use case but also because some of us sometimes find ourselves publishing to CMS systems that expect markdown as the file format and don't allow HTML uploads. This would include flavors like reStructuredText, Sphinx/MyST, GitHub, GitBook, and MkDocs. Also, mentioning AI, there is the Jupyter notebook format. I even deal with obscure Markdown variants like Fountain sometimes.

It seems pretty counterintuitive to me, but rather than stand up a simple website to host HTML output, some organizations view it as a security concern and would rather you do everything in some flavor of markdown within their CMS or LMS that renders to HTML anyway. These are some of the same systems that provide content for their help bots, which they are currently very invested in.

[Tim Green]

It seems pretty counterintuitive to me, but rather than stand up a simple website to host HTML output, some organizations view it as a security concern and would rather you do everything in some flavor of markdown within their CMS or LMS that renders to HTML anyway. These are some of the same systems that provide content for their help bots, which they are currently very invested in.

Then it makes sense to work directly in a simple text editor that supports Markdown.