Convert Emacs org files to markdown

What is Orgmk? §

Orgmk is a suite of bash Bash scripts for automating the conversion of Org mode documents to different formats (such as HTML or PDF)

Or in my case, to markdown!

The documentation for Orgmk is thorough and clear, so you could do little better than to read the official documentation. While it hasn’t been updated in 2 years, that is perhaps because it largely does what it needs to do. However towards the bottom of the readme it becomes apparent that the author intended to do more.

Installation §

The Orgmk installation process involves running a Makefile which creates symlinks from the location of your cloned Orgmk repo to /usr/local/bin/, which you to run them from anywhere on your machine. The official instructions allow for more configuration if necessary, but if the defaults work for you, all you need to do is:

git clone git@github.com:fniessen/orgmk.git
cd orgmk
make
make install

Converting Org to markdown §

Convert Org files to Github flavoured markdown.

org2gfm my-file.org

Outputs my-file.md.

Troubleshooting §

If Orgmk fails in any way, it might be because it failed to get the required dependencies but tried to solider on anyway. (It will install successfully without the dependencies, but will just fail at run time). This problem will happen if you only have the official ELPA repository and nothing more, which is how Emacs 25 comes by default.

The easiest resolution is simply to install the marmalade and MELPA package repositories.

Alternative §

For simpler situations, instead of Orgmk you might be able to just invoke emacs with --batch and do conversion through the command line.