I dont know much about scripting actions, but I revamped an existing export to Dropbox action such that I can send a draft to a particular folder in Dropbox. The thing is that is was sending a text file, but I needed it to be markup, as the file’s ultimate destination is Obsidian. I didn’t see anywhere where I can specify an “export as” so I just changed the extension to .md instead of .txt. Seems to work actually in my test, but since I dont know what I’m doing, I didn’t know if there’s some issue w/ this method. I don’t think just changing the extension of text files makes them markup, but maybe this signals to drafts to convert it, or if it’s natively in markup, not to convert it? How does this work? Are Drafts natively markup or text?
addendum: I just did a little test using some markup in my Drafts note: seems the basic stuff like ### Title and #hashtags work, but when I used [[page]], it was italicized in Drafts, though normal in Obsidian…not a big deal, but just trying to understand if I’m doing everything right.
You have a few points to tackle above, but the TL;DR is you have everything correct.
Markdown is syntax to markup a plain text file with additional plain text characters that when parsed appropriately by an application or script can be rendered or transformed to richly formatted text, or to another format where the text can be rendered as such (e.g. HTML).
Markdown content is in effect plain text with extra plain text.
The convention is for plain Markdown, you give it a file extension of .md, but there are multiple “flavours” of Markdown beyond the original, and they may have other file extensions by convention. For example MultiMarkdown often used .mmd. Sometimes even .markdown is used as a file extension for a Markdown file. Fundamentally, file extensions are convenience extensions, and it is the content that matters - i.e. plain text for Markdown.
The convention that Obisidian is coded to recognise as Markdown is only .md.
So, for Drafts to Obsidian with a Dropbox vault, you just want to export the raw content to a .md file in the vault’s folder.
Regarding the addendum, this is just about formatting. Drafts is about to have some notable advances around that, and you can modify these via CSS themes in Obsidian. The way the data is displayed is like a visualisation layer on top of the data, and you should look into how these work on both applications. It will open up a new world of customisation for you.
Thank you! This is very informative! I am not that technically savvy please help! What would be the step by step to change the extension file so the notes are saved by default in .md in Drafts? I tried searching in the preferences menu but I can’t find it.
Drafts uses a database, so there are no files “in” Drafts. For data coming out of Drafts and being saved to a file in Dropbox as for this original post, you would set the file extension in the filename. The action step that is saving to Dropbox.
