feat: Enable markdown text formatting for docx

[SimJeg]

Hi,

This PR adds markdown text formatting for docx documents (italic, bold, underline and hyperlinks). I included a new tests/data/docx/unit_test_formatting.docx document to illustrate it. Using the latest docling main the output of export_to_markdown is:

italic
bold
underline
hyperlink
italic and bold hyperlink
italic bold underline and hyperlink on the same line

with this PR it becomes:

italic
bold
underline
hyperlink
italic and bold hyperlink
italic bold underline and hyperlink on the same line

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[SimJeg]

Note: for underline I used the <u> / </u> tags that are not rendered on GitHub 😅

[SimJeg]

@maxmnemonic @PeterStaar-IBM do you need any additional info for this PR ?

[dolfim-ibm]

@SimJeg this is an interesting feature, but we should introduce it with an option for enable/disable, because not all output formats will be compatible with markdown styling. There could also be some consideration on whether to propagate text styling in the Docling document format, but the option will be needed.

[SimJeg]

Hi @dolfim-ibm,

Indeed, a different function should be applied for HTML for instance. I can add an argument to the convert function (e.g. style=[None, "markdown", "htlm"]).

As there are several options to do this and I don't know very well docling API, I'll wait for your confirmation before pushing updates.

[SimJeg]

@dolfim-ibm any update on it ?

[dolfim-ibm]

We actually are considering something similar to what you are proposing.

Adding the option for the format at convert time (with default None) is good, but we would like to have them in the PipelineOptions for the MS Word backend, since it will be something specific to it.

We will soon post more details, but the above is the general idea.