Markdown to Word With Images

Problem

Exporting Markdown to Word is rarely about producing a .docx file at all. The practical pain is that images are not embedded, headings do not map to Word heading styles, table formatting drifts, and image captions are left as plain body-text paragraphs. Driving pandoc manually can work, but it requires dependency checks, relative image-path validation, and a post-processing pass for captions, which is easy to skip.

How It Works

The skill turns conversion into a repeatable workflow: pandoc performs the core conversion, while scripts/check_images.py verifies that image references point to real files before conversion. scripts/md_to_docx.py then converts the Markdown document to .docx and normalizes image captions so they are centered, 8pt, and not italicized. If pandoc is missing, it attempts automatic installation and reminds the user to refresh the terminal; for manual pandoc runs, scripts/fix_captions.py can repair captions in an existing document.

• Image embedding: supports local relative paths and remote URLs, with pre-conversion path checks
• Style preservation: Markdown headings map to Word heading styles, and bold or italic text is largely preserved
• Reference documents: --reference-doc can control heading fonts, table styles, spacing, and margins
• Caption cleanup: converts Pandoc’s default caption paragraphs into a cleaner caption style

Limits

This is not a pure Python document generator; pandoc is required. Complex Word tables may lose merged cells or nested structures through a docx -> md -> docx round trip, and table-of-contents entries can degrade into plain links or text. .emf images may embed but render inconsistently across platforms. It fits best for exporting well-structured Markdown files with clean image paths into distributable Word documents.