Ulysses to Markdown

I like using the Ulysses app for writing. However, while you write in Markdown in the app, exporting seems to be limited to HTML, Doc, ePub etc. I couldn't find a way to export to simple Markdown.

So I wrote one.

Setting up an environment

The easiest way to install the required packages without conflicting with anything else on your machine is to use a virtual environment. It's easy to set up, assuming you have a python3 binary available:

python3 -m venv envdir
source envdir/bin/activate
# We're now using Python from the virtual environment, so we get python 3 when we run 'python'
pip install wheel
pip install -r requirements.txt

To go back to using the 'normal' version of Python in that terminal, you can just run deactivate. (Or just close the terminal.)

You'll need to use the source envdir/bin/activate command each time you start a new Terminal and want to run the script. You won't need to install packages each time, that's just a one-off.

Required packages

The following Python packages are required:

• BeautifulSoup 4
• lxml
• unidecode

In most cases pip install -r requirements.txt should do it.

You should then be able to run without an error:

$ ./ulyz-to-markdown.py
Usage: ./ulyz-to-markdown.py input [output]

[etc]

Getting your sheets into the filesystem

• Open Finder
• Open Ulysses
• Drag the sheet(s) you want to the Finder window

Processing the sheets

ulyz-to-markdown has one required parameter and one optional one.

Input

Input is the required parameter.

ulyz-to-markdown will accept three kinds of input:

• a .ulyz file
• a Contents.xml file extracted from a .ulyz file
• an input directory - it will search for *.ulyz and `*.xml' files.

Output

If the input is a single file, the output parameter is used as the output filename.

If the input is a directory, the output parameter is used as an output directory. It must exist before running, the script won't create it.

Problems?

SyntaxError: invalid syntax

If you see this error on a line with something like:

f"A string with {something in curly braces}"

Then this usually means you're trying to run using Python 2. The script will run using the command 'python', which on some systems (including macOS) is Python 2:

$ python --version
Python 2.7.18

You probably have python3 in your path (try python3 --version). If you do then see the environment section above. If not, see the Python website.