I have come across a couple of online html to markdown converters which might help - I hope it makes the process easier:
http://domchristie.github.io/to-markdown/ http://markable.in/editor/ This one has multiple format to multiple format conversion facility: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/try/ You get immediately conversions results on the right side of the panel. Cheers, Mani On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 12:13 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie < magnus.ihse.bur...@oracle.com> wrote: > On 2015-02-06 18:18, Martijn Verburg wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> So I started digging into this (just the HTML path to start with) and the >> diff got pretty ridiculous. So I'm going to split the work into several >> parts: >> >> 1.) Fix HTML warnings and convert HTML styling to CSS styling (using >> internal stylesheet) >> >> 2.) Cosmetic changes to improve readability (change background to white >> for contrast, pick a more web readable font etc) and cleaning up any >> comments/whitespace in the document. >> >> 3.) Structural changes (moving sections around if that seems sensible, >> I'll post suggestions first) >> >> 4.) Finicky detail changes (the bit that will require the detailed review) >> >> I may combine 1&2 if the diff isn't ridiculously different. >> >> ====== >> >> If there's further consensus on Markdown then I can give that a go later >> (HTML to Markdown converter to start with anyone? ;-)), but I suspect >> Markdown readers aren't as ubiquitous as HTML readers and we'd have also >> have to include an "export to output type X" step/tool, not sure how much >> work that is, where it would get done etc. >> >> Sound reasonable? >> > > If you're prepared to spend the time converting the README to markdown, > maybe it's kind of waste of effort of first cleaning up the HTML? I'd very > much appreciate if you would do that -- if was to do it, it would surely be > put very far down my work queue. :( > > I have only heard positive resonses so far (both on the list and in > private) on going the markdown route, so I think we should at least > seriously consider it. > > As for HTML to markdown converter. I tried sudo apt-get install > python-html2text, and this is what it produced: > http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ihse/build-readme/README-builds.md > > It's probably a good starting point. Possibly the best way to go forward > for converting this is a combination of preparing the html document so it > is easier for html2markdown to process, and a manual post-conversion > cleanup. > > For the next step, I tried sudo apt-get install markdown. As far as I can > tell, this is the "official" markdown implementation from the guy who > invented the format. The result of a roundtrip (feeding the unmodified > README-builds.md from above) is here: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ > ihse/build-readme/README-builds-from-md.html > > Apart from all the >, it looks pretty OK for something I spent < 5 minutes > on. :) > > I also tried just removing the initial > and >>. This looks even better: > http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ihse/build-readme/README-builds-cleaned.md > and http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ihse/build-readme/README- > builds-cleaned-from-md.html, respectively. > > Most notably is the lack of tables, which is a limitation in markdown. > > I believe that we need to keep a html version in the repo as well, so we'd > probably have to go by some solution where we have a script (or make > target) that runs makedown on the .md file to produce the .html file, and > we'd just have to run that manually when we change the .md file. (Judging > by the frequency of updates to the README file in the past, this is not > likely to be very often. :-/) I can write that part. > > /Magnus > > -- @theNeomatrix369 <http://twitter.com/theNeomatrix369>* | **Blog <http://neomatrix369.wordpress.com>** | *LJC Associate & LJC Advocate (@adoptopenjdk & @adoptajsr programs) *Meet-a-Project - *MutabilityDetector <https://github.com/MutabilityDetector>* | **Bitbucket <https://bitbucket.org/neomatrix369>* * | **Github <https://github.com/neomatrix369>* * | **LinkedIn <http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/mani-sarkar/71/a77/39b>* *Come to Devoxx UK 2015:* http://www.devoxx.co.uk/ *Don't chase success, rather aim for "Excellence", and success will come chasing after you!*