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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

My kingdom for proper markdown support in google docs. Just let me toggle between wysiwyg vs markdown. Collaboration at a tech company using google docs is comically painful at times.

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+1 strong agree. I like Google Docs’ realtime collaborative editing, but the wysiwyg formatting (even if one has memorized the keyboard shortcuts) makes it hard to be fast the way I am in a Markdown-aware editor or vim. Plus I miss my vim motions!

I'd settle for a Markdown import. You could do your editing and writing of raw text in whatever you feel happy with, and then have gdocs transform it to its supposedly native format on upload.

Gdocs would then really only need to support the same semantics with underscores, asterisks, octothorpe heading levels and title sizes.

Oh boy, do I have a treat for you. Try saving the following as `input.md`:

    # Hello *world*
    
    ## Math
    
    $$x = 2 \cdot y^3$$
    
    - foo
    - bar
    - baz
    
    1. Yes
    2. No
    3. Maybe
    
    ---
    
      Right     Left     Center     Default
    -------     ------ ----------   -------
         12     12        12            12
        123     123       123          123
          1     1          1             1
    
    Table:  Demonstration of simple table syntax.

Then run

    pandoc -t html input.md | xclip -selection clipboard -t 'text/html'

And paste into a Google doc.

Whoah, that is a seriously neat trick. Thank you.

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