There was some enthusiasm lately regarding the newly added Markdown capabilities in LibreOffice. Oh, Markdown will bring peace on Earth! (LaTeX failed at that task long ago.) Examples:

We learn that:

Specifically, LibreOffice 26.2 supports the version called CommonMark.

Therefore:

Now the latest LibreOffice 26.2.1 can also turn a Word document into clean simple Markdown – or turn Markdown into a clean, formatted Word document – in just a couple of clicks.

On the other hand, ONLYOFFICE has quietly been supporting Markdown (I don’t know the flavor) for quite some time:

I therefore wanted to give a very cursory try of the Markdown capabilities of the latest LibreOffice 26.2.1.2 and ONLYOFFICE 9.3.1.8.

LibreOffice

I started by creating a native .odt document which I saved for reference. It looked like this:

I then saved it as .md and got this content:

This is a **quick test** regarding the Markdown capabilities of *LibreOffice 26.2.1.2*.


| ~~***Cat type** | ~~***Positives** | ~~***Negatives** | ~~***Rating** |
| - | - | - | - |
| ~~***Tuxedo** | ~~***Intelligent, affectionate** | ~~***Sassy** | ~~***\*\*\*\*\*** |
| ~~***Garfield** | ~~***Social, friendly** | ~~***Gluttonous, lazy, crazy** | ~~***\*\*\*** |
| ~~***Black** | ~~***Calm, affectionate** | ~~***?** | ~~***\*** |
| ~~***Tabby** | ~~***Friendly, intelligent, vocal** | ~~***Adventurous** | ~~***\*\*** |

Here’s the saved .md file as displayed by Typora:

You have most definitely noticed the errors made by LibreOffice Writer in converting to Markdown:

  • It inserted ~~* at the beginning of each table cell.
  • It made the content in each table cell bold.
  • It escaped inconsistently the stars in the last column.

But maybe LibreOffice can display it properly upon reopening?!

Nope. There is no such thing as magic!

LibreOffice: FAIL to save correct Markdown!

ONLYOFFICE

I started by creating a native .docx document which I saved for reference. It looked like this:

I then saved it as .md and got this content:

This is a **quick test** regarding the Markdown capabilities of ONLYOFFICE* 9.3.1.8*.  
   
| | | | |  
|-|-|-|-|  
| **Cat type** | **Positives** | **Negatives** | **Rating** |   
| Tuxedo | Intelligent, affectionate | Sassy | ***** |   
| Garfield | Social, friendly | Gluttonous, lazy, crazy | *** |   
| Black | Calm, affectionate | ? | * |   
| Tabby | Friendly, intelligent, vocal | Adventurous | ** |   
 

Here’s the saved .md file as displayed by Typora:

I hope you noticed the errors in the created Markdown:

  • In this case, I only italicized the version number, but somehow a space also got italicized. This usually doesn’t work in Markdown, so the asterisk should have been moved past the space, adjacent to a non-space character.
  • The definition of the table is strange. It has an empty header above the header.
  • Asterisks have not been escaped! Typora made a mess of them: instead of 5, 3, 1, 2 it displayed 1 (bold), 3, 1, 2. I’d expected it to interpret them as 1 (bold), 1 (italic), 1, 2 asterisks.

And here’s the saved .md file as displayed by ONLYOFFICE after reopening:

It even failed to recognize its own table! 😱

ONLYOFFICE: FAIL to save correct Markdown! FAIL to interpret its own tables!

Doing it by hand is always better

To assess the ability to open correct Markdown files, I created this one by hand:

This is a **quick test** regarding the Markdown capabilities of *crappy* word processors.

| **Cat type** | **Positives** | **Negatives** | **Rating** |
|-|-|-|-|  
| Tuxedo | Intelligent, affectionate | Sassy | \*\*\*\*\* |
| Garfield | Social, friendly | Gluttonous, lazy, crazy | \*\*\* |
| Black | Calm, affectionate | ? | \* |
| Tabby | Friendly, intelligent, vocal | Adventurous | \*\* |

It displayed as expected in Typora:

In LibreOffice:

In ONLYOFFICE:

Conclusions

  • Both LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE are unable to create correct Markdown files from .ODT and .DOCX documents.
  • Specifically, LibreOffice breaks the formatting of each and every table cell!
  • Additionally, ONLYOFFICE fails to recognize the tables that have been wrongly generated by itself!
  • Both LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE can open correct Markdown files created externally. They might be able to save them correctly after editing, but I didn’t test that.

How the fuck are they testing the software these days?!

They keep creating more and more shit under the name of “software,” but it never ever works right!