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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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>

> Back when they were quarreling over the standardization of OOXML, instead of pushing their own proprietary* desktop format

ODF was developed by a committee and predates OOXML by years and it was standardized by ISO before OOXML was even announced.

That's not pushing their own proprietary format. That's just using the existing ISO standard and not switching to a different, far more complex standard that served little purpose.

Hell even IBM threatened to leave ISO wholesale over Microsoft ramming OOXML through the standards body.

I wish microsoft would have been forced to make the entire windows API an ISO standard if they wanted OOXML to be one so bad

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.

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.

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.

WordPad was good for this on Windows - maybe too good.

AbiWord looked like it might be similar on Linux, but never kept up.

There is a very light weight, free program called "The Guide" which is also good for notes

https://portableapps.com/apps/office/the_guide_portable

https://theguide.sourceforge.net/

It hasn't been updated for about 8 years, but it doesn't require installation and we have found it very useful.

There is value in familiar tools for familiar work. Someone typing letters to send to family is not intrinsically going be interested in, or see any benefit from, some paradigm shift to hypermedia-first document creation.

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.

> 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".

Read about RTF.

Care to explain how ODT is a proprietary format, please?

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).

Pandoc could convert between .doc/.docx and .md, but having that in LibreOffice would still be a welcome and obvious convenience.

I haven't like using the CLI since having to give up my NeXT Cube and pbpaste/copy and so forth.

Well, there is now pandoc in the browser: https://pandoc.org/app/

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.

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.

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