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/
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).