Pandoc is an amazing document converter that I use very frequently. Earlier today, as I was converting a Markdown document (.md) to a Word one (.docx) I realized that the tables weren’t rendered properly. More precisely, after opening the document with LibreOffice, the first column of every tables was using the full width of the document and I was not able to quickly fix this issue with LibreOffice. I figured that this was caused by either pandoc or LibreOffice and so I first checked the version of pandoc installed:

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$ apt policy pandoc
pandoc:
 Installed: 2.2.1-3+b2
 Candidate: 2.2.1-3+b2
 Version table:
*** 2.2.1-3+b2 500
       500 http://debian.mirror.rafal.ca/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
       500 http://deb.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
       100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Given that this version was more than a year old, I thought that this issue could have being fixed in newer versions and so I installed v2.7.3 (released last June) (downloading pandoc-2.7.3-1-amd64.deb and using dpkg):

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$ apt policy pandoc
pandoc:
 Installed: 2.7.3-1
 Candidate: 2.7.3-1
 Version table:
*** 2.7.3-1 100
      100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
    2.2.1-3+b2 500
      500 http://debian.mirror.rafal.ca/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
      500 http://deb.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages

This did not solve the issue but I quickly found a two-steps work around. First I converted the Markdown file to a OpendDocument one (.odt):

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$ pandoc file.md file.odt

Second I used LibreOffice to do the conversion! This does not solve the issue but it’s a good work around (good enough for me).