Best way to import Libreoffice documents with many footnotes

Things I have tried

I tried searching this forum and the help docs.

What I’m trying to do

I have a couple of large documents written in LibreOffice, fileformat .odt. They contain the usual formatting, which is rendered in often less than ideal ways in Obsidian.

  • Bullet points are rendered with two extra spaces. My solution to this has been to copy-paste the section into another text editor, so it becomes plain text and then replace bullet with two extra spaces with a line plus space, which renders a bullet in Obsidian. There are other small formatting errors, like Obsidian inserting underscores in the middle of words and such. It takes much time to clean up, so I’ve found it’s easier to just make it into plain text and lose that formatting. But when I copy all the text into plain text, I lose my footnotes.

I have hundreds of pages to process and the work is very slow to manually go through each footnote.

What would a better practice be?

If you are comfortable with the command line,
Pandoc might be a good idea to give a try.

https://pandoc.org/

pandoc test1.odt -s -o test1.md would be the command for a file named test1.odt

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m not comfortable at all with the terminal, but did give it a try and to my surprise it did work fairly well for most of the formatting. The footnotes are rendered beautifully and the standard formatting looks good too so far. But … during the conversion, pandoc inserted line breaks all over the place! So now I have a new problem!

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