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Show HN: Gdocs-me-up: a high-fidelity Google Docs exporter (github.com)

1 points by behdad ↗ HN
Over the years I had written dozens of Google Docs documents, that I wanted to post to my website. Not only Google Docs's publish feature is broken and incomplete, Google does not index Google Docs either. So I set out to fix it for myself using AI agents. Sharing here in case someone else finds it useful.

9 comments

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arshxyz
Amazing how many products exist purely due to Google's lack of motivation to do things right. Will be using this a lot.

Does Google Apps Script expose an API to do this though? It would be easier to download an html page from within GDocs without having to run something locally.

snoopen
I haven't had a detailed look but yeah, I think most of this could be rolled into a Google App Script and made into an add-on. I actually did something similar years ago but for exporting to html for email, going through a few libraries for html and CSS manipulation and inlining.
behdad
Possibly. I wasn't determined enough to look into that. Plus, it's easier for me to batch download my documents from the terminal.

Note that it will be a HTML plus directory of images, so you need to return an archive.

adityamishra241
This looks really useful. Does it also preserve images, tables, and formatting when exporting from Google Docs?
behdad
I use it extensively to preserve images and formatting, in the pageless layout. I haven't tested it much with tables. Give it a try and file issues if it doesn't work well and I'll pass on to my agents. Thanks!
97-109-107
Thank you for publishing this.

After years of trying to edit things locally and share/publish on Google Docs I gave up.

You either have to commit fully to Google Docs or sidestep. I'm sidestepping with smalldocs at this time.

hwc
Behdad, why isn't this just part of Google Docs?
behdad
Good question, isn't it? GDocs has a "publish to web" feature, but it's vastly broken and loses formatting and image sizing and everything. It's just not priority for Google.