"What does MS Word offer over Markdown" isn't a good question, because they're not the same thing -- Word is a program and Markdown is a file type. There's nothing that stops a Markdown-based editor from having a full set of features. I've very rarely felt that I was missing out on features when using iA Writer or Ulysses compared to a word processor, although occasionally I wished for either the kind of document juggling that Scrivener is so good at or actual full-blown text editor features like BBEdit. But I haven't reached for an old school word processor as my first choice as a composition tool in... probably 15 years. And I definitely do write a lot.

The most obvious WYSIWYG competitor for novelWriter is Scrivener, which is similar to Ulysses -- and also shares the limitation that it can only export to Word rather than import. Nevertheless, its testimonials page is filled with praise from people who arguably write more than I do. :)

Writing a table of contents is my formatters job, not mine. It takes place after both my editor and my proofreader have completed their jobs, at which point I don't touch the file any more. If you format your own, then you're already in an small niche.

Some people may need "special characters" they can't type, but I have keybindings for the characters I use.

Grammar checking and corrections is my proofreaders job, not mine. It happens after I've converted my document and sent it off.

Macros are supported in pretty much every editor I've ever used for plain-text. I use lots of macros, but exactly zero of them for my novels.

I don't need to send and receive documents with no conversion needed. I do one export when I'm done with my first draft, and then I edit and do one more export before handing it over to my proofreader. Then, sure, I review those changes in Librewriter. The proportion of my time that takes is tiny. It'd be nice not to have to, but I'd take that over having to work in a word processor during writing any day.

> No offense but you don't sound like someone who writes a lot?

As someone who has written several novels, that's how your comment came across to me. At the same time I know novelists range from the pen and paper type (e.g. Gaiman, King to give two examples discussed in this thread) up to wanting word processors with all bells and whistles - it's very much down to taste.

* Table of contents: solved by Pandoc.

* Inserting special characters: personally I don't find those "character choosing" windows to be very convenient. Hunt and peck is a slow way to type! Anyway, you can do this in Markdown with either Unicode (if you have the right keyboard) or you can write HTML escape codes (&tm; etc.)

* Automatic (grammar/spelling). I don't like check as I type, but sure. Anyway, Emacs provides this if I want it.

* Macros. Hello? Emacs? (Also, Pandoc has a scripting interface.)

I may not be published yet but I've written my own book. I've also published books for other people. I did both of those with a Markdown-based toolchain. It works.

Edit: Just to prove the point: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692553916 . Go see for yourself how the book is formatted.

The "inserting special characters" one is a bit of a "eh?" for most of us Mac users, I think, since most special characters can be typed using the Option key and the character chooser (which is indeed not very convenient!) is system-wide and should work in a native build of at least the GUI version of Emacs. But, yep -- Markdown and Word aren't the same categories of things. How comfortable your Markdown editing experience is depends on how comfortable your Markdown editor is.

(Also, I wrote a Markdown-to-ePub script, too! Although I don't think anything I've got up online uses it anymore.)

pandoc, emacs, and scripting are _not_ a realistic option for most writers. They're writers, not programming geeks.

I'm a Markdown fan, but really there _are_ better solutions for book writing that maintain the ease that Markdown brings. Things like ASCIIDoc.

And in emacs, you can insert essentially any Unicode character with `C-x 8 RET`...add swiper and you're off to the races :)

Also, if emacs was good enough for Neal Stephenson, I'm sold...though I hear he uses Scrivener now!