Export
Every export is a plain GET request, and every export button is an ordinary link. Anything you can
click, you can also bookmark, script, or fetch with curl.
Where the buttons are
Open a document in the reading view of either the DocuCommit editor (desktop app) or the DocuCommit server (read-only web app). The Actions panel beside the page carries three links:
- Export Markdown
- Export HTML
- Export PDF
On the server that panel also holds History and a follow button; in the editor it also holds Delete, Edit, History, and Move. A project’s own page has the same three export links in its Actions panel, and there they export the whole project.
The URLs
GET /projects/{project}/export/{section}/{document}?format=md
GET /projects/{project}/export?format=pdf
format accepts md (or markdown), html, or pdf; anything else returns 400. The response
comes back as an attachment named after the document or project slug, with the matching extension.
On a server holding more than one library, the same two paths also exist under /library/{library}/.
The three formats
| Format | format value | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Markdown | md, markdown | The source file, byte for byte, frontmatter included |
| HTML | html | One self-contained .html file — no external stylesheet, no external images |
pdf | The same page rendered through a compact print stylesheet |
Markdown reads the file off disk and changes nothing about it.
HTML renders the page through the same flexmark pipeline the editor and the server use, then
makes the result stand alone: the stylesheet is inlined into a <style> block instead of linked,
and images stored in the project’s _attachments/ folder are embedded as base64 data URIs. PNG,
JPEG, GIF, SVG, and WebP are recognised and carry their proper media type.
PDF builds that same HTML with a print stylesheet in place of the site’s — sans-serif, 11pt, 1.5 cm margins, wrapping code blocks — and converts it. Callouts keep their colours and their Information / Success / Warning / Danger labels.
Rendered exports keep the reading layout around the page — breadcrumbs, the project tree, the on-page contents list — with the action links removed.
Whole-project exports
A project export walks the project in tree order, top to bottom.
- Markdown joins the raw source files with a
---horizontal rule between them. - HTML and PDF insert a heading in front of each section as the walk enters it —
<h2>for a top-level section, one level deeper for each level of nesting — and separate documents with a horizontal rule.
What survives, and what does not
Includes are expanded in HTML and PDF. The export renderer resolves include fences, so a
transcluded document appears inline in the exported file. The Markdown export copies the file from
disk, so it keeps the fence exactly as you wrote it.
Mermaid diagrams and code highlighting do not survive. Both are done by the browser at display time, so HTML and PDF exports contain the fenced source in a plain code block instead of a diagram or coloured code. draw.io diagrams are the exception: they are stored as SVG files and come through intact.
Only images are bundled. An attachment that is linked rather than shown — a PDF, a spreadsheet, a zip — stays a link in the HTML export, pointing back at the DocuCommit URL it came from. The same applies to the navigation and to links between documents: those are root-relative URLs that need a running DocuCommit to resolve.
There is no DOCX export. Markdown, HTML, and PDF are the three formats. Comments made on the server are not part of any of them.
For what the Markdown itself may contain, see the Markdown reference.