Converting a .doc to Markdown

By , .

This posts gathers the preliminary reflections on including Markdown into the publishing workflow of INC. INC often receives papers and articles in .doc format. That’s why it is necessary to test the possibilities for automated conversion from .doc to Markdown.

.doc as rendered by LibreOffice

.doc as rendered by LibreOffice

The test document chosen is in .doc format and it contains:

  • Basic formatting (e.g. bold and italic);
  • Footnotes;
  • References;
  • Blockquotes;
  • Hyperlinks;
  • Images.

First Method: Textutil (Mac only) + Pandoc

The first method employs the command line tool textutil (only available on Mac), to convert the document to HTML, and the command line tool Pandoc.

The advantage of this method is the fact that it only requires a one-liner:
textutil -convert html file.doc -stdout | pandoc -f html -t markdown -o file.md

Outcomes

Resulting Markdown as rendered by Mou

Resulting Markdown as rendered by Mou

Pros

  • Basic formatting is preserved;

Cons

  • Images are missing;
  • Line breaks are converted into backslashes;
  • Footnotes are put at the end of the document without keeping the link within the text;
  • No formatting for blockquotes;
  • There is formatting for hyperlinks, but is not compatible with Markdown.

Second Method: LibreOffice (4.0.4.2) + Pandoc

The second methods consists in exporting the .doc to XHTML via LibreOffice and then…

Outcomes

The test document converted to HTML via LibreOffice

The test document converted to HTML via LibreOffice

The HTML code outputted by LibreOffice has a CSS style applied in a paragraph-specific way, this makes it pretty unreadable.

The HTML is then converted to Markdown via Pandoc:
pandoc file.html -f html -t markdown -o file.md

Pros

  • Hyperlinks are preserved;

Cons

  • Basic formatting is not preserved;
  • Images are included in the markdown but formatted as text, making the file impossible to open;
  • There is formatting for footnotes, but is not compatible with Markdown.
  • No formatting for blockquotes;
  • There is formatting for hyperlinks, but is not compatible with Markdown.

Conclusions

The first method, Textutil (Mac only) + Pandoc, seems to be more convenient time-wise. However it is still necessary to add images, blockquotes, footnotes by hand. Furthermore hyperlinks need to be reformatted and slashes needs to be deleted.