longNowForMd/README.md

This package takes a markdown file, and creates a new markdown file in which each link is accompanied by an archive.org link, in the format [...](original link) ([a](archive.org link)).

How to install

• Add this file to your path, for instance by moving it to the /usr/bin folder and giving it execute permissions, or
• copy its content (except the last line) into your .bashrc file, or

This utility requires archivenow as a dependency, which itself requires a python installation. It can be installed with

$ pip install archivenow ## respectively, pip3

How to use

$ longnow file.md

For a reasonably sized file, the process will take a long time, so this is more of a "fire and forget, and then come back in a couple of hours" tool. The process can be safely stopped and restarted at any point, and archive links are remembered, but the errors file is created again each time.

To do

• Deal elegantly with images. Right now, they are also archived, and have to be removed manually afterwards.
• Possibly: Throttle requests to the internet archive less. Right now, I'm sending a link roughly every 12 seconds, and then sleeping for a minute every 15 requests. This is probably too much throttling (the theoretical limit is 15 requests per minute), but I think that it does reduce the error rate.
• Pull requests are welcome.

How to use to back up Google Files

You can download a .odt file from Google, and then convert it to a markdown file with

function pandocodt(){
  source="$1.odt"
  output="$1.md"
  pandoc -s "$source" -t markdown-raw_html-native_divs-native_spans-fenced_divs-bracketed_spans | awk ' /^$/ { print "\n"; } /./ { printf("%s ", $0); } END { print ""; } ' | sed -r 's/([0-9]+\.)/\n\1/g' | sed -r 's/\*\*(.*)\*\*/## \1/g'  | tr -s " " | sed -r 's/\\//g' | sed -r 's/\[\*/\[/g' | sed -r 's/\*\]/\]/g' > "$output"
  ## Explanation: 
  ## markdown-raw_html-native_divs-native_spans-fenced_divs-bracketed_spans: various flags to generate some markdown I like
  ## sed -r 's/\*\*(.*)\*\*/## \1/g': transform **Header** into ## Header
  ## sed -r 's/\\//g': Delete annoying "\"s
  ## awk ' /^$/ { print "\n"; } /./ { printf("%s ", $0); } END { print ""; } ': compress paragraphs; see https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6910/there-must-be-a-better-way-to-replace-single-newlines-only
  ## sed -r 's/([0-9]*\.)/\n\1/g': Makes lists nicer.
  ## tr -s " ": Replaces multiple spaces
}

## Use: pandocodt FileNameWithoutExtension

Then, convert the file back to html with

function pandocmd(){
  source="$1.md"
  output="$1.html"
  pandoc -r gfm "$source" -o "$output"
  ## sed -i 's|\[ \]\(([^\)]*)\)| |g' "$source" ## This removes links around spaces, which are very annoying. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/297686/non-greedy-match-with-sed-regex-emulate-perls
}

## Use: pandocmd FileNameWithoutExtension

(this requires changing the name of the output file from Source.md.longnow to Source.longnow.md before running $ pandocmd Source.longnow)

Then copy and paste the html into a Google doc and fix fomatting mistakes.