ProseMirror as a client for editing Google Docs

[marek]

I need an interface for live editing GDocs document - that includes reading and writing via Google Docs API or Google Drive API (not sure yet which one will suit better). Most likely I will choose a ProseMirror as a client side editor. I don’t want to duplicate all GDocs functionalities, more like just the functionalities from Insert and Format menus, that’s it.

I came up with two approaches on how to do it if building from scratch:

• implement a Google Docs schema Structure of a Google Docs document  |  Google Docs API and use JSONs when exchanging data with an Google Docs API
• simpler solution IMO: not caring about schema and making use of one the libraries for converting html → gdocs json or markdown → gdocs json; example libs: https://github.com/veselin-stamenov/google-docs-to-html-parser/tree/master/google-docs-converter-server-master; GitHub - times/doctop: Like Tabletop.js — but for Google Docs! (ArchieML? interesting)

Do you see any potential problems with what I described?

Which approach would you recommend?

Has anyone seen something similar? I prefer to avoid building it from scratch

[marijn]

Could work, I think. Definitely going to be a lot of finnicky code involved though. For a start, Google Docs stores things like lists in a flat way, so you’ll need some moderately clever format conversion code to address that.

[marek]

Thanks marijn! Do you think it’s gonna take a lot of finnicky code if I used one of the avaialable converters? Do you find any of them particularly useful here?

times/doctop/blob/master/src/doctop.js

filipedeschamps/parse-google-docs-json/blob/master/source/parser.js

GitHub - Financial-Times/structured-google-docs-client: A client library for...

Best, Marek