onenote2md

An automated tool to convert OneNote notebooks to markdown files. :+1:

Features

• Convert OneNote 2016 Notebooks/Sections/Section Groups/Pages to folders and md files.
• Retains rich text formatting.
• Handles lists.
• Converts OneNote tables to md tables (GFM).
• Maps images to files and provide links to md files.
• Converts tags/todo lists.
• Converts code blocks/citations/quotes.

How to use it

• Execute from command-line using Onenote2md.Cmd NOTEBOOKNAME to convert your notebook to md in current directory.
• Use Onenote2md.Cmd NOTEBOOKNAME OUTPUTDIR to specify your output directory.

OneNote object model

• OneNote uses a simple object model of nested hierarchical objects. The base object is the Notebook which contain SectionGroups and Section objects which in turn contain Page objects.
• Page contain the actual note information including text, image, lists, table and other formatted content.
• Page itself is further decomposed into a hierachical structure containing page object OEChildren elements.
• Each Page specifies a Title and a PageLevel.
• Each OEChildren can further contain:
  • Text
  • List
  • Table
  • Image
  • Further OEChildren elements.
• Formatted text is maintained as CDATA HTML content.
• A table is specified with the following format:

Table:
<one:OE>
    <one:Table>
    <one:Columns>
        <one:Column index=0 width=>
        <one:Column index=n width=>
    </one:Columns>
    <one:Row>
        <one:Cell>
            <one:T>
        <one:Cell>
    </one:Row>

OneNote object model synopsis:

Notebook
    SectionGroup
        SectionGroup
        Section
    Section
        Page
            OEChildren

Mapping

• We map OneNote content to markdown using the following conventions:
• Rich text formatting (bold, italic, underline) is retained.

Page Title

• Converted to heading 1 (#).

Headers

• OneNote headers (heading 1 to 6) are mapped to md headers (# to ######).

Quotes and Citations

• Quotes and Citations a converted to italics.

Code

• Code is converted to single line or

multiline 

Rich text

• Italics is converted to italics.
• Bold is converted to bold.
• Underline is converted to bold.
• Strikethrough is converted to ~~strikethrough~~.

Lists

• Unordered lists use * for list beginning and white space nesting for nesting such as:

  • Sub list
    • Sub list
      • Sub list
        • Sub list

• Ordered lists use 1 for list beginning and white space nesting for nesting such as:

  1. Sub list
     1. Sub list
     2. Sub list
  2. Sub list
     1. Sub list
     2. Sub list

Links

• I'm an inline-style link

Images

• Images are converted to png/jpg and linked as local image files.
• Every image is stored in the same folder as its page.
• Sample images:
• Inline-style:
• 

Tables

• Tables are supported through GFM.
• Tables can contain rich text.
• Lists within tables are not supported.
• Sample table :

HTML

• Html can be embedded within md.

Horizontal rule

Videos

Task lists

• Converted to md as:
  • [ ] Task 1
  • [x] Task 2 completed

Tag

• Converted using emojis such as :+1:

Attachments

• Linked in place

example-attachment.pdf

Roadmap

• Support handwriting, drawing etc as image export.

Resources

OneNote

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/onenote/onenote-home
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/onenote/onenote-developer-reference

Markdown

• https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet
• https://guides.github.com/pdfs/markdown-cheatsheet-online.pdf
• https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/
• https://stackedit.io/app#