In Libreoffice, typing *foo* gives foo
and typing _foo_ will underline foo.
Is there also a method to make foo look like foo ?
I’m using LibreOffice 3.5.7.2 Build ID: 350m1(Build:2)
on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
I think there is no one, but you can use a shortcut [Ctrl+I].
@FrankknarF - you don’t say what version of LibO you’re using. It would be nice if the autocorrect option for *foo* and _bar_ could be customized, but this isn’t the case (at the moment!).
Apparently it was intended to be the case that a user could have a custom autocorrect entry that included formatting, and I’m not sure if this would work for the scenario you describe. It seems that feature was broken anyway, but according to a recent post by @manj_k this was a bug and now should be fixed for 4.0.6.1 and 4.1.3.1 (I’m on 4.0.4.2 so can’t check).
As @mariosv notes, you can just use CTRL-I, but that’s not quite the same as pseudo-Markdown, I know. 
You could also set up your own “delimiters”, and then do a regex search-replace like this one, and even assign that as a macro to a shortcut key or put it in the menu, but that seems like a lot of work.
I’ve added the LibreOffice version.
This is a really big lack on LO for me (I am on Debian, which is only installing LibreOffice 3.5.4.2, even in late 2014) , so that could be the problem). I dump text into it from an AlphaSmart Neo (admittedly, I am going it be in a very tiny minority here) and that can only use markup, not meta keys. It then dumps the text into LO as if it were s string of chars from the keyboard, so markup is an ideal way to ‘format’ text on the Neo and have it come out right on LO, except there’s no customisation. So I want to be able to use some markup to get italic, and using meta keys is no good since I just want to dump a text string into the word processor. At present I have to use underline then either fix by hand or search and replace.
Just a comment.