Tips: converting entire topic to markdown

Summarizing long discussions as a PEP Author is a difficult job. Discourse provides features such as AI-powered summarization, but they cannot be used to go through all opinions. To follow the topic, one needs to jump around within the thread, and it is easy to overlook opinions in between.

Since Discourse uses XHR to load posts in fragments, browser search functions, reading modes, and tools that convert HTML to Markdown do not work well.

I found a technique to work around this problem. When you try to print, Discourse displays a print mode page, which you can convert to Markdown using a browser extension or by using the URL of that page with an external tool.

For example, open https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-822-dedented-multiline-string-d-string/105519/print and close the print dialog.

Regards,

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You can also navigate to a “raw” view by replacing t/topic-name by raw:

https://discuss.python.org/raw/105519

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Ah, very nice tip. I’ll add another one, which actually I’ve used in areas completely unrelated to Discourse. A browser extension is great if you’re going to do this a lot, but what if you only want to do it occasionally? Copy some content from any web site to your clipboard, open a reply or new topic, paste it in. You now have Markdown for that content.

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Wow! Thank you!
I don’t know why Discourse doesn’t show that link. It is very important for this AI era.

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I was also going to suggest “reader” mode in Firefox, but it seems that discourse kicks you back to the regular page if you try and enable it.

Edit:

Oddly, it does work on desktop, but not for mobile (specifically the Fennec branch of Firefox). Haven’t had that issue on any other site…