4 ms·

This 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 ter

This 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 8mo ago
For 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 8mo ago
  Pandoc could convert between .doc/.docx and .md, but having that in LibreOffice would still be a welcome and obvious convenience.
  - WillAdams 8mo ago
    I haven't like using the CLI since having to give up my NeXT Cube and pbpaste/copy and so forth.
    - lametti 8mo ago
      Well, there is now pandoc in the browser: https://pandoc.org/app/ https://pandoc.org/app/
- smelendez 8mo ago
  It’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 8mo ago
There'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 8mo ago
  Word 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 8mo ago
    Back 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 8mo ago
I'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.

WillAdams 8mo ago

For 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 8mo ago
Pandoc could convert between .doc/.docx and .md, but having that in LibreOffice would still be a welcome and obvious convenience.
- WillAdams 8mo ago
  I haven't like using the CLI since having to give up my NeXT Cube and pbpaste/copy and so forth.
  - lametti 8mo ago
    Well, there is now pandoc in the browser: https://pandoc.org/app/ https://pandoc.org/app/
smelendez 8mo ago
It’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 8mo ago

There'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 8mo ago
Word 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 8mo ago
  Back 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 8mo ago

I'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.