I have successfully setup pagedown on a site I am using, but I have run into an issue when trying to edit HTML that has already been created. I would like to take a HTML chunk that was created using pagedown, convert it back to markdown and place it in the editor.
I looked around but didn't see this covered in the documentation. I took a look in the Markdown.Converter.js file to see if there was a makeMarkdown function to match the makeHTML function but I didn't see anything.
How do I go about converting HTML back to markdown for editing?
As far as I know, no, there is no existing solution that will convert html to markdown. There are a few problems that would need to be solved before that can be done, for example, representing floats, text alignment, font sizes, etc in markdown. That leaves you with two options:
Store the markdown in the database, then convert the markdown to html on the fly. This has the advantage of being able to easily edit the text and reduces the amount of data you're storing in the database.
the second option is to store both the markdown and the html in the database. This uses more disk space, however will result in less resources being used to retrieve the html because you no longer have to convert markdown to html on the fly.
Both options are viable, each with their own advantages. I usually use the first option so that i don't have duplicate data in the database, but the second option is likely easier to use because the display-system that displays the content won't be required to have a markdown processor, instead it just pulls the generated html directly from the database.
I'll likely move to the second option instead in future projects because it makes the data more portable. If you were to access the database in a different server-language, you wouldn't need a markdown processor written in that language to get the html.