What's the best way to use dynalist to write an article

[Ron_Liu]

I am new to dynalist, and trying to store everything into dynalist, but I find it is difficult to use it to write articles. For the below example:

So far, it is all good. But when I try to export it as a nice markdown file as below:

But really I got this:

I have to pay lots of efforts to be a valid markdown article. So I wondering if I did right or if there is existing way to do my job? If not, can I suggest the following features when exporting:

1. add a export option called markdown
2. for items, change them to be #, ##, ###, etc, depends which level there are
3. for notes, could you add some space to ``` code block, otherwise I have to manually add these space ahead.

like the outcome below:

[Erica]

There’s no such feature right now, maybe you can open a new feature request in the “Features” category.

There’s also a problem with this “export to article” feature: it doesn’t know when you want to stop making items numbers. Some people like to write paragraphs in items, so they are not necessarily all headings. Assuming an item is always a heading is an assumption we don’t want to make.

I’m all for making code blocks prettier though, they can really use some work.

[Ron_Liu]

Yes, you are right, it is just an assumption that items equals to headlines. Maybe, it can give options like transfer items to headlines or just lists as it was. I will try to open a new feature request.

Thanks for your explanation.

[Vincent_Tang]

personally i just use app.classeur.io, I think its a very native way of writing guides / posts. Follows traditional markdown formatting and writes kind of like writing a post on talk.dynalist.io (discourse forum)

I wrote this post yesterday

Vincent Tang

below is what my raw document looks like as i typed it out

https://app.classeur.io/#!/files/ZjiIApvfFjf0dM2Lg6Q4

I literally didn’t even look at wordpress at all when I published above document. Formatting comes out 90% on point, and it handles code snippets well too using traditional markdown formatting like ```python {code snippet here} ````

What’s also nice is that when i wrote my blog post in app.classeur.io its platform independent as it follows all standard markdown procedures, meaning 100% portable. I use my own imgur + shareX setup to quickly make all my images and have 3 layers of redundancy built in in the event I lose data (directly through app.classeur.io, 1 through my wordpress host, and a direct backup to dropbox through wordpress admin)

below is my general setup

Vincent Tang

When I write long lengthy technical manuals I prefer using gitbooks.io

Example of one I’ve written for shareX + image server setup

https://anacondapython.gitbooks.io/sharex-user-manual/content/

this doesn’t really answer your question but this is the work around that i use

you can probably make your own version of markdown export from dynalist, another use made one for mac users

Workflow for Alfred: export to Markdown and create Bear note

I would use this but unfortunately I don’t use a mac, and those are all mac-os specific apps though if it was in python or a webapp I would probably use it though

[Ron_Liu]

@Vincent_Tang Thanks a lot for your information.

Actually, what I want is just a simple transforming process from dynalist to markdown, and with alfred workflow, it can be very smooth. I will look into that.

And you are right, no matter how good exporting become, there are still a gap between outline and article, so if it is for writing, traditional writing tools, like you mentioned app.classeur.io and gitbook, are the best way to do.

Thanks for sharing all these information, I even went to your blog, learned a lot. Thanks again.

Cheers,
Ron