Freemind to Markdown Converter in Python.

This is a simple tool that converts a Freemind mind map to Markdown format.

I'm developing it to help speed up the development of e-books for publication on LeanPub. LeanPub converts Markdown copy into a fine-looking published e-book; LeanPub authors need to provide their copy in Markdown format.

I've used mind maps for outlining over many years. Freemind is an excellent open source implementation that makes it easy to develop and reshape the text of an article or book, and I use it every day.

It's possible, but tedious, to take a Freemind mind map and manually create the contents in Markdown. Since Freemind stores mindmaps in a simple XML format, I though it would be straightforward to write a converter that takes a .mm file and generates the Markdown files you need to publish on LeanPub.

fm2md is not finished, but it has enough features to be usable.

You can see an example of its use in the convert-map-to-blog script.

The script expects to be called with the path to the mind map as its first argument. It will create manuscript and image directories in the same directory as the mind map, and will create Book.txt and a chapter for each top-level branch of the mind map. It also creates a script called copy-images.sh in the same directory as the mind map. Run that script to copy all required external images into the images directory.

chmod +x ./convert-map-to-blog.py
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
virtualenv --python python2 ~/pyenv2
#virtualenv --python python3 ~/pyenv3
source ~/pyenv2/bin/activate
pip install html2text
pip install lxml
./convert-map-to-blog.py <file.md>