Google Docs – How to Copy or Download Published Documents Shared by Others

When you have an HTML file in Google Drive and ask to open it with Google Docs, there's no 'convert' option AFAICT and you get a 'view source' sort of view instead of seeing it rendered.

If you have the HTML file saved locally and you upload from the Google Docs page itself, there is a 'convert' option in the upload dialog, and that will produce a rendered version of the page. In my limited experience with that conversion step (importing some HTML produced by the ASCIIDoc formatter), the rendered HTML didn't look very good -- it came out with an awful-looking font and lost some formatting from the original HTML.

The top-rated Google search results for importing HTML into Google Docs all seem to assume you're importing HTML data into a spreadsheet.

So while it seems to be possible to get some kind of rendered HTML by going through one specific path, this doesn't appear to be a high priority for Google Docs.

Google uses a proprietary format called “kix”, which was introduced with the then new editor a few years ago. The basic structure of a kix file isn't comparable to structured markup (like docx which is basically a zipped collection of XML files holding content and styles) but rather like a data file which starts with the textual content followed by styling information delimited by ASCII control codes.

What you see in your editor is the HTML-rendered content provided by the underlying JavaScript. If you want to work with the document in another application you are able to access the files via the Google Drive API, as John already pointed you to. Although it’s technically possible yet undocumented to export the kix file, this is due to the proprietary format of not so much use.