Show HN: Gdocs-me-up: a high-fidelity Google Docs exporter

github.com

20 points by behdad 2 days ago

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.

arshxyz 2 days ago

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 a day ago

    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 a day ago

    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.

97-109-107 2 days ago

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.

adityamishra241 2 days ago

This looks really useful. Does it also preserve images, tables, and formatting when exporting from Google Docs?

  • behdad a day ago

    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!

hwc a day ago

Behdad, why isn't this just part of Google Docs?

  • behdad a day ago

    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.