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LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown
- freedomben 7mo agoThis is great news. I've long felt markdown support was a missed opportunity for LibreOffice. There are great options out there, and with AI it's not even terrible to roll-your-own, but I already have LibreOffice anyway and being able to use that instead of reaching for a different tool would be killer. Might be a little while until this makes it into distro packages, but if anyone has tried it I'd love to hear how it compares to the other options.
- WillAdams 7mo agoFor me, being able to open typical .doc files and re-save as .md w/ a reasonable approximation of formatting is _huge_, and I'm very appreciative of it (and I've long argued that an office suite which just offered only what .md can do would meet the needs of the vast majority of users _and_ keep them from making the sorts of abominable documents folks often complain about).
- bitwize 7mo agoPandoc could convert between .doc/.docx and .md, but having that in LibreOffice would still be a welcome and obvious convenience.
- smelendez 7mo agoIt’s interesting, a lot of use cases have migrated to tools like that, including Apple Notes, Notion, Slack Canvas and, of course, Gmail and Outlook. I think a lot of people “need” Word the same way they “need” a pickup truck. It feels better to buy it up front than to worry about needing it on short notice and not having it.
- cxr 7mo agoThere's a lot of missed opportunity for LibreOffice, almost all of it to do with insisting on seeing the world in terms that fit neatly within the paradigm of 90s and early 2000s era office suites. Back when they were quarreling over the standardization of OOXML, instead of pushing their own proprietary** desktop format, they should have instead been pushing hard for something that could be shared with and opened by anyone who has a Web browser (in other words: "anyone")—something that uses HTML as a container format and can degrade gracefully even if you don't have any kind of office suite installed and the only reader software you have for it is Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Edge. There was no chance of beating Microsoft's incumbency with Office when being libre+gratis was the _only_ distinguishing feature. It required doing something different at a fundamental level. Even Microsoft beat them to getting halfway to the place they should have been when they bought the company that wrote what became Windows Live Writer app (which is now itself open source, though neglected, and still mired in visions of desktop software from the 90s: <https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter>). > The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing[…] The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end[…] A standardized "Markdown for the Web" (or AsciiDoc) with native browser support would be a good 80/20 start and would move things out of weird proprietary office formats and towards plain text[…] > Right now LibreOffice is aligned against this goal as a result of perverse incentives to continue perpetuating the MS Office model of document creation, editing, and (let's face it: email-based) distribution. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795918>
- bitwize 7mo agoWord is a WYSIWYG document editor with built-in version control and annotations. In order to match that feature set with something like Markdown, you'd basically have to reinvent Word in all ways but for file format. And if you expect Word's current user base to get by with Emacs or Vim or Zed and git, you really are programmer-brained and need to develop more empathy for ordinary people.
- twirlip 7mo agoBack in the long-ago times, I saw ordinary people fight tooth-and-nail to keep their WordPerfect on DOS instead of switching to Windows and Word, despite it requiring those overlays kept above their keyboard function keys and being non-WYSIWYG. Ordinary people aren't neophiles, nor is Word especially intuitive. They simply want what that app to which they are familiar.
- Digit-Al 7mo agoI'm not sure this is quite what you are looking for, though I could be wrong. As far as I can tell they haven't added support for writing Markdown, the added support for importing to and exporting from Markdown.
- albert_e 7mo agoWhat is a good way to convert MS Office documents to markdown -- until Microsoft adds "Saves As" option to office apps. Anything that can run locally instead of uploading potentially sensitive stuff to random websites. Would be handy on work PCs.
- ckcheng 7mo agoYou could open the doc or docx in LibreOffice 26.2 and use its Markdown export feature?
- albert_e 7mo agoLibreoffice cannot be installed on work PC
- 1718627440 7mo agoYou can put it on and USB stick, see e.g. https://portableapps.com/ https://portableapps.com/, this includes a package manger and other tools.
- cricalix 7mo agoAnd potentially get fired for using unauthorised software on a corporate machine. Or find out tha USB storage is disabled (which is better than getting fired).
- johannesrexx 7mo agoThat is horribly Draconian. You need to find a better place to work. "Unauthorized software" is a thing where you work? OMFG.
- ThePowerOfFuet 7mo agoThen talk to whoever manages your machines.
- 7mo ago
- Almondsetat 7mo agoDoes it say how much Markdown is covered? I doubt that it will get the integrated Latex formulas...
- SoftTalker 7mo agoWell LaTeX formulas are not part of standard Markdown, which is a few different Header levels, simple lists, bold, italics, blockquote and... that's about it?
- mieses 7mo agosimple lists? 50 examples and still gaping holes in the logic and no consistent implementation of lists across any 2 editors. https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#loose https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#loose
- SoftTalker 7mo agoI mean standard Markdown has numbered lists and bullet point lists. That's it.
- mieses 7mo agosounds simple until you try to use it
- SoftTalker 7mo agoI use it all the time. I don't try to make it do more than it does.
- abmmgb 7mo agoWhat are peoples' favourite md implementations? Curious as there are different varieties and even more varied opinions. I am building a lightweight project folder managing app supporting markdown and I am between Commonmark and GitHub flavoured markdown and want to gather thoughts.
- Diti 7mo agoI know it doesn’t answer your question, but: AsciiDoc. All major forges support it and it has the same features as all the other Markdown flavors combined.
- TheRealPomax 7mo agoGFM, because HTML in markdown should not be a parse error, and getting twenty different markdown "specs" to all agree on new syntax for bits they are obviously missing (like details, classed scoping, transclusions, etc) is not happening.
- masfuerte 7mo agoHTML in markdown has never been a parse error. Unless you're using something very broken. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html
- TheRealPomax 7mo agoExcept under GFM, html is explicitly part of the spec[1], not just "it's not a parse error, but that's because it's just text that doesn't fall in any predefined markdown syntax category", and good luck finding a WYSIWYG markdown editor that gets them right. The number of editors that completely break on <details> alone is disheartening. [1] https://github.github.com/gfm/ https://github.github.com/gfm/
- abmmgb 7mo agoI was actually thinking for going with GFM seems popular with many, despite the occasional strong opinions against it..
- thunderbong 7mo agoI got really excited that I would be able to write in Markdown. Unfortunately, from the article: > Markdown import and export features.
- azangru 7mo agoWhy would you need LibreOffice to write in Markdown? That would be, like, one of the slowest Markdown editors out there.
- 2pie 7mo agoAre you sure ? It would be faster than most electron based editors
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rippeltippel 7mo agoHow about opening Word documents and being able to save them to Markdown in one click? That's super useful to me.
- BoredomIsFun 7mo agoTo copy/paste LLM outputs with maintaining format.
- jdboyd 7mo agoOpen .docx file, save as Markdown to nicely preserve things like headings, bold, etc. I moderately frequently have reason to want to go .docx to .md because I have a lot of ediing/rewriting to do and I'd rather work in Emacs than LibreOffice Writer.
- mmooss 7mo agoMarkdown is a text markup language, of course. The output does not look like the input (unless you want to read raw text Markdown, in which case LibreOffice works fine). How would that look in a single-pane, edit-in-place, wysiwyg editor? Where would you type the input, and where and when would it show the output?
- phartenfeller 7mo agoGreat news. My first thought was that I want to see how this looks. Unfortunately there is not a single screenshot in the announcement. Missed opportunity in my opinion.
- timbit42 7mo agoWhat's to screenshot? It only imports and exports Markdown.
- kkfx 7mo agoI keep wondering how much longer they'll cling to these monsters, office suites as a concept. They make no sense since decades, not just for producing TERRIBLE print documents, but also as awful formats for working with text and any data they might contain. I see this latest development as an admission that their time is up, but I don't see that same awareness from the people who actually use the software.
- grosswait 7mo agoSo if the people making the software don’t see their time is up and the people using the software don’t see their time is up, who decides their time is up?
- anthk 7mo agokkfx it's right. Office users shoudn't need nothing more complex that WordPad and a simple spreadsheet such as Gnucalc. Everything else should be either DTP domain, scientific notebooks instead of crappy spreadsheets with parsing bugs (genomics) and Access instead of SQLite3 and any GUI of choice to place forms in a WYSIWYG way making queries against that database.
- kkfx 7mo agoThe need for a functioning digitalised society, because the current one is digitalising slowly, decades behind technological potential, and poorly at that, so it doesn't work; the result is a lethal inefficiency that is making society itself increasingly unmanageable, with a level of social fracture that I fear is irreparable. Oh, sure, office suites aren't the only cause, nor the main one, but they are a contributing factor. The model of giving a computer to secretarial staff without any training, which is why this software was created in the first place, has now been extended to almost all "office" workers, and well, it's among the causes of our decline. We haven't worked with sheets of paper, pages, suspended folders (as directories are rendered in file managers on average), and so on for a long time now; it's high time, then, that the modern General Magic, the Office model, stop screwing everyone over. This won't be understood anytime soon, and the result will be a state of affairs even worse than the present.
- butz 7mo agoWatch out for RCEs :)
- alansaber 7mo agoIt's happened before, it'll happen again.
- PhilippGille 7mo agoReference: Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516
- mmarian 7mo agoOh, this is actually very helpful for me! I have an AI copilot extension for LibreOffice Writer and I need to export the doc to a text file before sending it to the LLM. The problem is that I lose the semantic formatting (eg heading). Link to the extension for anyone curious: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/99471 https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/99471
- alansaber 7mo agoI know nothing about libre but in MS Word there's the office api you can use to send MD to an API, there's nothing similar? It's great to be able to read/write directly in MD.
- syskuh 7mo ago[dead]
- aussieguy1234 7mo agoIt's markdown import and export. Does not support writing in Markdown.
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]
- sourcegrift 7mo agoI like libreoffice but I can never bring myself to run java and electron apps on my computer.
- fsckboy 7mo agolibreoffice is written in C++
- amai 7mo agoWhich Markdown dialect does it support?
- amai 7mo agoIt seem they only support Commonmark: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide/markdown.html?DbPAR=WRITER https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide... So no tables, footnotes, table of content, math formulas, citations, … So the better way to create markdown is still to use pandoc and convert your libre office documents into the much more powerful pandoc markdown dialect: https://garrettgman.github.io/rmarkdown/authoring_pandoc_markdown.html https://garrettgman.github.io/rmarkdown/authoring_pandoc_mar...
- amai 7mo agoIf you really want a good markdown editor better have a look at https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/