this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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[โ€“] huppakee@piefed.social 8 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I understand why the world is the way it is, but still it should have been obvious all along that it is not ideal for the government to data in a file format owned by a company. Even worse, a foreign company.

[โ€“] NostraDavid@programming.dev 5 points 12 hours ago

Do note that xlsx, docx, etc, are all just .zip files with XML files inside. If such a file is corrupt, extract it, and check what you can salvage.

That being said: Still controlled by MS, and thus a potential threat to the EU.

[โ€“] Zagorath@quokk.au 8 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

Mostโ€”certainly not all, but mostโ€”documents that are written in Microsoft Word, or in LibreOffice Writer, would be better off as either markdown plain text files, or as LaTeX.

CMV.

[โ€“] aldhissla@piefed.world 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Hear hear

90% of everything I read/write is either plaintext, explicit .md, or some .md-adjacent proprietary markup language (Atlassian, BBcode,...)

[โ€“] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago

I don't think it's really possible to have a reasonable argument against a vendor agnostic open standard in most cases.

[โ€“] loutr@sh.itjust.works 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Sure, but 99% of MSO/LibreOffice users would quit after about 45s of trying to put together a document in LaTeX.

[โ€“] Zagorath@quokk.au 2 points 15 hours ago

Sure. And 90% of those are writing stuff that would be better off as markdown.

[โ€“] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

*with accessibility tags applied.

[โ€“] Zagorath@quokk.au 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean here. Both markdown and LaTeX are plain text. They're easily read by a screen reader. Though unless the screen reader is specially-designed for LaTeX support, it may be difficult to comprehend. That's on the screen reader though, not the document format.

[โ€“] testaccount372920@piefed.zip 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I assume they mean stuff like image descriptions that you can add in Microslop Word (don't know about LibreOffice). It's quite a neat feature that wouldn't work with markdown (might work with LaTeX), because these image descriptions are not visible to someone reading a document.

[โ€“] Zagorath@quokk.au 2 points 9 hours ago

Image descriptions are a thing in markdown. Images are inserted into markdown documents with this syntax:

![alt text](url)
[โ€“] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Correct, accessibility also differentiates between titles and content, to better assist readers who use a screen reader.

[โ€“] Zagorath@quokk.au 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I replied to the other user showing how markdown image descriptions work. Titles are added with hashes.

# title
## subtitle

Text

### sub-sub title

Etc.
[โ€“] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

Screen reader should pick that up.

It's a bit trickier in LaTeX (depending on layout), given they convert to an untagged pdf by default using pdftex. For defaults such as section/subsection etc I think some auto-tagging has been added, but my memory is not great.

Issues crop up when you need to hack something (e.g. indenting parts of a proof using the quote environment to aid readability, creating more complex tables, or just using coloured text to indicate element relations), and here manual tagging is a must!

[โ€“] Bullerfar@lemmy.world 10 points 21 hours ago

Great news!

[โ€“] thenoirwolfess@fedinsfw.app 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Nice! A huge blow to those still trying to push Microsoft

[โ€“] olof@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago
[โ€“] HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works 3 points 20 hours ago

When are we going to have the equivalent for PDF documents, with the ability to comment, fill and sign, as in AdobeAR?