Persisting Markdown and Styling with Lexical

[ZehuaZhang]

I'm currently migrating to Lexical for our Markdown editor and working through the documentation.

I have a couple of questions:

Can the raw Markdown text be retrieved from the editor state? I need to store it in our backend and serve it later.

How are styles like left alignment, font size, etc., persisted? Specifically, is there a standard way to represent these in Markdown (or an extended syntax) so that they can be stored as plain text in a database and rendered later with the correct styling?

I'm curious how Meta handles this internally — how Markdown content is stored and reconstructed on the frontend. Would someone be open to chatting? If so, feel free to grab a time here: calendly.com/zehuazhang.

Also, if you know of any maintainers or contributors who might be the right folks to speak with, could you tag them here? I’m happy to coordinate scheduling on my end.

[kokoc30]

You can export Markdown with @lexical/markdown:

import { $convertToMarkdownString, TRANSFORMERS } from '@lexical/markdown';

const markdown = editor.getEditorState().read(() =>
  $convertToMarkdownString(TRANSFORMERS),
);
// Store markdown as a text value in your backend.

This serializes the current node tree; it doesn't recover the original Markdown source byte-for-byte. If preserving the exact input spelling/whitespace is a requirement, store that source separately. The Markdown helpers export the features covered by the supplied transformers.

For alignment, font size, and other rich formatting, I would store Lexical JSON as the canonical editable document, with Markdown as an optional derived export:

// Save a committed editor-state snapshot.
const jsonString = JSON.stringify(editor.getEditorState().toJSON());

// Restore into an editor with the same node types registered.
editor.setEditorState(editor.parseEditorState(jsonString));

These are the documented JSON persistence APIs. JSON is still text and can be stored in a text or JSON database column.

The distinction matters because ordinary Markdown has no standard font-size or paragraph-alignment syntax, and the built-in Markdown transformers don't encode those styles. Lexical's node JSON can: text nodes serialize their style string and formatting, while element nodes serialize their alignment as format. Styles supplied only by your application's theme/CSS still need that CSS when rendering; they aren't automatically embedded into the JSON.

If Markdown must be your only storage format, define an extension/custom transformer and a matching renderer for the extra styling, or deliberately restrict the editor to Markdown-representable features. A custom syntax will require support in every consumer of that Markdown.

I can describe the public serialization APIs, but can't establish how Meta's internal applications store their content. I checked the docs and node schemas; I haven't run your editor.