[HN Gopher] LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown
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LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 244 points
Date : 2026-03-08 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.documentfoundation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.documentfoundation.org)
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Pandoc could convert between .doc/.docx and .md, but having
| that in LibreOffice would still be a welcome and obvious
| convenience.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I haven't like using the CLI since having to give up my
| NeXT Cube and pbpaste/copy and so forth.
| cxr wrote:
| 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>).
|
| > _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>
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ikr678 wrote:
| I have been looking for a simple local only wysiwyg
| alternative to Onenote and there just.. arent any good
| ones? Joplin is close but everything is now markdown and
| I hate it, I've gone back to phyiscally writing down
| notes.
|
| I'm old, these are notes for me only, I don't care that
| they arent 'web publishing' ready.
| cxr wrote:
| > And if you expect Word's current user base to get by with
| Emacs or Vim or Zed and git
|
| ... who said that? Are they in the room now?
|
| I'm baffled when these kinds of responses show up in these
| threads-- _every_ time I 've brought this up. Like, it's
| pure hallucination. And the readiness to go from what is
| _my_ very clear call for "empathy for ordinary people" to
| an explicit suggestion that I might be programmer-brained
| is inexplicable.
|
| Ordinary people don't want to do any of the things uttered
| someone who's telling them to stop using Google Docs and to
| go "download" something called "LibreOffice".
| opan wrote:
| Nitpick, but I love vim (and to a lesser extent emacs) and
| am not a programmer (sadly). I don't believe you need to be
| a programmer to use them. Using vim is "just" using your
| computer. Personal notes, system configuration (dotfiles),
| anime playlist management (.m3u files mainly), checking the
| name of a unicode character I don't recognize (vim-
| characterize), inverting capitalization (select and hit ~)
| or making large formatting changes to some text (block
| select visual mode and multi-line editing, macros) to post
| elsewhere, bulk renaming of files (vidir), writing emails
| (aerc), vim is my go-to for all that. That's not even
| getting into vim-inspired separate programs like ranger and
| qutebrowser.
| anthk wrote:
| Read about RTF.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| 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.
| albert_e wrote:
| What 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The canonical answer is Pandoc.
| ckcheng wrote:
| You could open the doc or docx in LibreOffice 26.2 and use its
| Markdown export feature?
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| > until Microsoft adds "Saves As" option to office apps
|
| LibreOffice also allows to convert documents via command line,
| so there's one more bonus.
| mrw34 wrote:
| https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
| layer8 wrote:
| If you like to have it integrated in Word:
| https://www.writage.com/features/
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Based on what others have suggested, I've just tried out pandoc
| for this, and it's produced really good results in CommonMark
| from some quite hideous Word documents.
| ilogik wrote:
| Microsoft added markdown support to Notepad, and that went well
| /s
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Copy-paste it to Obsidian.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Does it say how much Markdown is covered? I doubt that it will
| get the integrated Latex formulas...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Well 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 wrote:
| simple 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
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I mean standard Markdown has numbered lists and bullet
| point lists. That's it.
| mieses wrote:
| sounds simple until you try to use it
| abmmgb wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| GFM, 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 wrote:
| HTML in markdown has never been a parse error. Unless you're
| using something very broken.
|
| https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html
| contravariant wrote:
| At this point pandoc, that way I can at least be sure I can
| translate it to whatever format I need.
| black_knight wrote:
| I love Pandoc's markdown. Wrote my PhD thesis in it, and most
| of my subsequent articles.
| thunderbong wrote:
| I got really excited that I would be able to write in Markdown.
|
| Unfortunately, from the article:
|
| > Markdown import and export features.
| azangru wrote:
| Why would you need LibreOffice to write in Markdown? That would
| be, like, one of the slowest Markdown editors out there.
| 2pie wrote:
| Are you sure ? It would be faster than most electron based
| editors
| mmooss wrote:
| Markdown 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?
| hotsauceror wrote:
| Obsidian does this. It displays the raw Markdown for the line
| under the cursor, and renders the marked down content
| everywhere else in the document.
| phartenfeller wrote:
| Great 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.
| kkfx wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| kkfx 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.
| butz wrote:
| Watch out for RCEs :)
| alansaber wrote:
| It's happened before, it'll happen again.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| Reference: Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution
| Vulnerability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516
| mmarian wrote:
| Oh, 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
| alansaber wrote:
| I 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.
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