Open Codex Code & Culture

Accepting Feedback from Word/GDoc Users as Markdown

When I ask people to give me feedback, I’d like them to work with whatever format or app is most convenient to them. I write everything in markdown, often in Sublime Text and sometimes in Obsidian. Many people prefer reviewing in Word or GDocs. Using pandoc, I can create most any file format, but getting others’ annotations back into my markdown source files has never been easy. This task is now easier with AI.

I use pandoc to generate a Word docx version, emailed or placed on Google Drive.
The reviewer annotates using Word, Google Docs, OpenOffice, etc.
I use the docx2md_add_comment.lua filter to convert the annotated docx file back to markdown.
I Ask Claude Opus 4 Thinking to port the comments from the feedback file to my source file, which takes 5–10 minutes, with this prompt:

Someone added html/markdown comments to the file 06-ai-advice-feedback-smith.md I need you to find Smith’s comments and port them to the original markdown file 06-ai-advice.md (keeping them as markdown comments).

To make sure I don’t miss any comments, it’s easy to count the number of comments or to diff the files.

Round-tripping a reviewers’ granular edits would be more difficult, especially if I sent them a version of the document with formatting, citations, and footnotes rendered. It wouldn’t be as bad if I sent them my source markdown plunked into a docx file, but I don’t think AI is up to the task to tracking small diffs between a source and rendered version of a file. For annotations, however, the above workflow works well!

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