Workbench

Exporting Org Mode to Markdown with Yaml Frontmatter

Most static site generators use Markdown as their input format.

Org mode's built-in Markdown exporter works quite well, and ox-gfm gives you the extra bells and whistles supported by GitHub flavored Markdown.

There are two problems:

Problems

Static site generators rely on YAML frontmatter for document metadata

For example:

---
title: Hello World
description: A brief description of this content
date: 2026-05-21
tags: foo, bar, bat
---

Various org-to-markdown exporters have lousy support for frontmatter

(There is ox-hugo, but it uses various structural conventions that quickly get frustrating if you're not using Hugo.)

A Lazy Solution Hack

An elisp function to provide better frontmatter support is on my one-of-these-days lists, but in the meantime, if you can live it and if you don't mind using ox-gfm, you can just define your frontmatter as an export block at the top of the org files you want to export to markdown:

#+BEGIN_EXPORT markdown
---
title: Inline YAML Frontmatter
description: It's ugly but it works
---
#+END_EXPORT

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam ante erat, sollicitudin ac elit in, accumsan sollicitudin nunc. Mauris consequat tincidunt facilisis. Maecenas ut mi diam. In vehicula ipsum sed purus semper, ut porta nisi bibendum. Pellentesque in est tristique, hendrerit enim non, sodales mauris. Fusce ut nulla placerat nisi elementum tempor. Donec imperdiet mollis odio, dictum posuere nulla bibendum congue. Sed sapien justo, molestie id convallis a, dapibus sit amet mauris. Sed malesuada faucibus erat eget dignissim. Mauris lacinia nunc eu gravida blandit. Nullam viverra diam vel tincidunt aliquam. Proin at accumsan turpis, iaculis malesuada odio. Pellentesque id faucibus augue.

Fusce et libero sed est porttitor dignissim. Quisque rhoncus lacus ac laoreet interdum. In tortor libero, ultricies vitae accumsan nec, mattis vel orci. Quisque facilisis tincidunt mi, at mattis ipsum cursus eu. Donec faucibus a ante ac volutpat. Etiam dui eros, pulvinar congue accumsan ac, ultrices et eros. Aliquam non vehicula tortor, ut laoreet nisi. Nulla facilisi. Phasellus vel bibendum mi. Donec a urna nisi. Pellentesque tempus nunc et tellus convallis eleifend.

(ox-gfm is necessary because the native ox-md exporter helpfully converts occurrences of --- into emdashes.)

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Wed May 20 2026 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)