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I want to be able to write in Markdown and convert to Microsoft Word and have Word recognise the H1 in Markdown as Heading 1, body font as body font etc.

I would usually avoid Word but this is a solution for my Mother-in-law who writes professional Selection criteria. Her clients need the document in Word format.

I want to allow her to write in Markdown and then have setup some predefined font styles in Word so that she can just import the markdown and it will be styled accordingly.

Currently, the closest I can get is by using "ByWord" for mac, which exports to Word, however, you have to style every heading because Word does not recognise the H1's as Headings etc.

4 Answers 4

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Using pandoc as proposed in this solution allows you to directly convert your markdown file into a .docx file and retains proper headings.

Get pandoc version 1.9 or higher. Then:

pandoc myfile.txt -o myfile.docx
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Check out this really useful guide, and there are some good tips in the comments too: Think of Microsoft Word as the internet — Practically Efficient

The main steps are:

  • Install MultiMarkdown

  • Convert (Multi)Markdown to open document format (FODT):

      mmd2ODF.pl yourmarkdownfile.txt
    
  • Save FODT as DOC. Use LibreOffice or OpenOffice to do so. LibreOffice opens FODT automatically, but OpenOffice.org requires an add-on.

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Markdown is meant to generate HTML, and your editor probably has this option already. Word can open HTML and it mostly just works. At least it did for me just now :)

Hope this helps.

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Maybe the easiest approach would be to simplify the Markdown syntax as much as possible for your Mother-in-law (e.g. require her to use hashtags instead of underlines for headings) and then put together a few Word macros to convert that syntax to Word styles. If she's not doing anything especially fancy, the macros would be pretty simple.

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