Generate Markdown from MDX

[peterpeterparker]

Hi,

Is there an option or build command to generate Markdown files from MDX?

I'm kind of extensively using MDX in the source of my documentation and want to build an /llms.txt file which — though I'm not entirely sure — I assume works best when it contains links to documentation in Markdown format (not HTML). That's why I'm wondering how I can output MD from MDX.

[peterpeterparker]

Ah, I guess I can follow the same path that was shared there: #10899 (comment) but, still somehow needs a way to generate MD from MDX

[slorber]

There is no way to generate MD from MDX because MDX is more expressive than MD and let you embed React components within MD. Components can be interactive, and translating them to MD can be impossible, requiring running them to determine what they render and then converting the resulting HTML to a string. HTML is also more expressive than MD (but it's not interactive), but at least it could be embedded in MD docs.

What we do for the blog RSS feed content is we run the static site generation, and then read the static HTML files we output to create the HTML feed content. This permits to ensure you get all your MDX components pre-rendered to HTML (or course, we lose the interactivity side but it's ok). You can probably find packages to convert HTML to MD.

Attempts to convert MDX to HTML or MD outside of our SSG pipeline is likely tricky. That's what we tried first for the blog feed content and it didn't work that well, leading us to change our approach. (see #5664)

[peterpeterparker]

Thanks for the detailed answer and for sharing your solution ideas. It makes sense!

[peterpeterparker]

I implemented this solution. Documented it in the issue related to llms.txt.
#10899 (comment)