Your daily dose of “fuck Microsoft” is here!
The Document Foundation (TDF) recently announced the release of LibreOffice 26.8, and while it packs many new features, its highlight is the lack of any AI integration. This is quite the opposite of what Microsoft has been doing with its Office suite, but the tale of the disagreements between these two entities is as old as time itself, so nothing surprising. Now, TDF has explained why it cannot display some fancy charts that Microsoft Office can visualize without a problem.
Also explained at LO’s blog, with a less of a clickbait title: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/17/libreoffice-26-8-and-interoperability/
All I want to do is write a simple document. Many people have already written plenty of software to do just that … I don’t need it to do anything else.
Any company that wants to engineer anything else beyond that is just trying to justify to everyone why they would want to install a 90hp outboard motor on a little goldfish.
The problem is one person wants a complex feature here, another person needs another complex feature there. When you edit book-length texts you need styles, regular expressions in find/replace, plugins for referencing software etc. Interestingly, Word may do bells and whistles, but LO does the first two better than Word, and the third one as well as Word.
I use Markdown a lot for the plain text advantages but to me a huge limitation is that it doesn’t do colours and tabs. There are of course people writing books in Markdown, but I find it very limiting and ultimately counterproductive even for note-taking.
Sadly, there’s still no rtf alternative.
My requirements:
Office formats are over the top, require a fat office suite. epub is a website, even worse. Lightweight Markup formats like Markdown, Asciidoc, can’t carry their media. A html with base64 media comes the closest, sadly.
This isn’t a real answer because as far as I know there’s no tool that helps you with this, but you should be able to put base-64 encoded images into markdown documents too. At the very least by just putting raw HTML image tags.
What would be “nicer” would be if one could use the references feature that allows you to put links in the body but their destinations in the footer to stash the images at the bottom of the document, but I don’t think that’ll work, and I haven’t tried it.
That having been said, I personally think a folder of files, with images separated from the text, and referenced with relative paths, is better for 100 other reasons, with the only disadvantage being that you’d have to zip it up to send it to someone else. But if you’ve got embedding as a requirement, you could maybe try jamming them into the markdown.
Or make a new format! Mdgz, which is just a gziped tar of a file called index.md, and then a collection of any other files desired, and then get readers to resolve links only ever within that structure so it’s encapsulated. Should be pretty doable, easy to work with if you don’t have any special tools, but also possible to make tools for. I believe in you!
Yeah, i did this with asciidoctor, named it adcx, with full word/odf-like directory structure and meta + mimetype file. But the shell script turned into a project-manager, got out of hand with bugs; i want to do a rewrite in python for forever now. But what holds me back is 1. if i do this seriously, i want to do it format-independent (modular i guess) and 2. python wrapper for a ruby toolchain? But i hate Ruby. And 3. more important projects first.
LaTeX is something I’ve been meaning to explore.
Personally I can highly recommend combining emacs orgmode with LaTeX. It gives you the full power of LaTeX, but without having to deal with all of its ins and outs just for basic text formatting.
Also check out typst, it may be more approachable (though they have a closed source web app; the compiler is free and open source, so you can use it with any text editor with a plugin for it, or just write your text in markdown, get a template, compile).
This is the whole overarching problem with tech. Most of us have fairly simple problems with fairly simple solutions, and tech has just straight up solved those needs, sometimes well over a decade ago.
I’m not saying there’s nowhere left for tech to improve, especially in the medical and biotech space, but in the consumer market there’s only so much we realistically need. It has been addressed, end of sentence, but capitalism’s need to extract infinite profit does not jive with solved problems.
Sometimes before I was born, that’d be 3 decades ago.
Networked collaborative office applications were a thing before 1995, BTW. Networks were not quite up to the task, but the rest was there.
Famous things like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD and even raytracers were already feature-complete (by the computing ability of that time).
The Web (not the current one, but the hand-edited HTML pages by amateurs, Perl scripts as CGI, web rings and directories one) was the main new revolutionary thing in those, as you might have noticed, it’s also the very thing they are trying to destroy from all angles.
The overarching problem is that people who want you to buy things you don’t need and not buy things you need from someone else and not tell them to go to hell are able to push regulations and standards in their favor. They are joined by power-hungry people in governments in that.
All that is tangential to personal computers. A personal computer is a very powerful concept, especially with the Web (as it existed), and there are people trying to dilute and disperse and destroy that.
It’s all similar to printing press, mass media, widespread literacy, freedom of speech, all these things. A very important thing to protect.
Well, now I feel old.
I do feel like anyone who hasn’t had to write multiple-hundred-page technical documents in Framemaker on an HP-UX C100 workstation with a couple of hundred MB of RAM shouldn’t be allowed to complain about any modern office software.
And don’t get me started on “automating the secretarial pool for fun and profit with WordPerfect DOS macros.”
Kids today…