alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
Replies
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).
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.
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>