Text docs to rich docs

One advantage of using LibreOffice is that it enables documents to be created and edited via a GUI, so why supply it with mere text files? One reason is to simplify the task of note-taking on a low-powered machine, or on a device with a small screen. Under those circumstances, trying to create documents inside LibreOffice becomes an exercise in frustration. Also, a GUI may be unavailable in some situations, such as when the note-taker is logged into a remote machine via a command-line SSH terminal.

However, LibreOffice is such a useful tool that hardware deprivations during the note-taking process shouldn’t discourage us from importing the notes into the app at a later date. This article looks at a few text-based formats which can be read by LibreOffice’s Writer, Draw, Impress, Calc and Base tools – perhaps after being processed by other command line operations first.

Writer

Of course, notes can be written in plain old ASCII, but there’s a more powerful format which only requires a little more work: Markdown. It was originally designed for easy conversion into converter tool () supports the main ones, such as CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Markdown Extra, and reStructuredText, a competitor to Markdown favoured by the Python community.