Thanks for sharing both. I'm always happy to be reminded of new LibreOffice releases.
An interesting idea in that blog post (that I've seen countless times elsewhere): do people honestly believe there's a future where we can still read Markdown files but can't read ODF files? I get that a plaintext format is easier to process, but in what potential future do we still have the ability to open any kind of file and we don't still have code to access the contents of an ODF file?
That silliness aside, I'm all for improving support of popular document formats.
Arguably we might one day have the code, but not have the processor power and memory to spare, if current oligopsony-driventrends in computer component pricing continue.
If the average person do longer has the computational power to open an ODF file anymore, they have far bigger problems than not being able to open an ODF file...
My guess is that we would have the code to access ODF files but the process of running that code would be too troublesome for most of the people. I think I can grab a copy of WordPerfect from the Internet Archive (or similar) and try to open it within the emulator, but it wouldn't be the same as just opening a plain text file which happens to be formatted in Markdown.
mdaniel | a month ago
It seems it's CommonMark: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide/markdown.html?DbPAR=WRITER#:~:text=libreoffice%20implements%20the%20commonmark%20markdown%20specification
[OP] freddyb | a month ago
Originally came here via https://blog.iwl.me/2026/03/08/libreoffice-markdown/, but it's a bit of an advertisement so I think the original source is better
gnafuthegreat | a month ago
Thanks for sharing both. I'm always happy to be reminded of new LibreOffice releases.
An interesting idea in that blog post (that I've seen countless times elsewhere): do people honestly believe there's a future where we can still read Markdown files but can't read ODF files? I get that a plaintext format is easier to process, but in what potential future do we still have the ability to open any kind of file and we don't still have code to access the contents of an ODF file?
That silliness aside, I'm all for improving support of popular document formats.
gcupc | a month ago
Arguably we might one day have the code, but not have the processor power and memory to spare, if current oligopsony-driventrends in computer component pricing continue.
calvin | a month ago
If the average person do longer has the computational power to open an ODF file anymore, they have far bigger problems than not being able to open an ODF file...
basix | a month ago
My guess is that we would have the code to access ODF files but the process of running that code would be too troublesome for most of the people. I think I can grab a copy of WordPerfect from the Internet Archive (or similar) and try to open it within the emulator, but it wouldn't be the same as just opening a plain text file which happens to be formatted in Markdown.
pekkavaa | a month ago
How does it handle images pasted from the clipboard? I recall VSCode having a convenient support for that; it saves the image next to the open file.