Gemini to Markdown converter now more accessible

Some time ago I published a nice tool for converting Gemini text to Markdown. It goes to some trouble to get the spacing around blocks of links or preformatted text right. There are alternatives, including a very short sed script.

Who needs this?

It is important for Gemini that it gradually get accepted into the wider ecosystem of tools, like curl and pandoc. We need things which convert Gemini text into other formats, such as PDF and HTML. My particular tool, gemtext2md, does the conversion into Markdown.

You might want this if you are doing a capsule or journal that is originally written in Gemini text but which you always want to be available via HTML or Markdown as well.

Who needs something else?

This tool is not for helping people convert Gemini text to PDF. There is a better route than Gemtext -> Markdown -> PDF, and that is Gemtext -> LaTeX -> PDF, which gives better output. I have a different tool for that, also on my Github page.

gemtext2md source repo

gemtext2latex source repo

What has just changed?

The code was originally written in OCaml, and that meant people had to have the OCaml toolchain installed. I have just rewritten the entire thing in Rust, by hand translating from the OCaml. This was an interesting exercise, though at one level Rust and OCaml are pretty similar, and I took full advantage of that.

Rust has a better toolchain, and more mindshare than OCaml. Hence the switch.