longform VS obsidian-pandoc

Otherwise, even if it is a bit convoluted, the longform plugin can be used to compile a collection of different notes in a single "manuscript". Just create a longform project and have one card per file, then you compile them.

The longform plugin is all about taking individual notes for chapters/snippets/etc in a single project and putting them together.

Depending on your usecase you could try longform plugin to compile and export multiple files as pdf.

In addition, if you'd like to split your long Markdown file into separate files (one for each chapter, or whatever structure your academic writing has) you could look into the Longform plugin. It can merge multiple files (and do a lot of other stuff, like removing links etc), and then you could add the Pandoc conversion as a final step in the Longform workflow. https://github.com/kevboh/longform

It might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it is free and it's all local. If you decide to give it a go, try a few of the community made plugins (I use Longform, Advanced Tables, Templater and Tracker) to see just how cool and easy it is to customise. Installing directly from the community plugins browser isn't the most secure, but you can manually install whatever you want just by downloading directly from GitHub. It's a lot easier than it sounds!

The longform plugin is pretty nice, turning Obsidian into a Scrivener-esque tool for writing individual bits that can be drag-rearranged in the project pane view, with the added benefit of being able to use Obsidian's easy cross-linkings.

The Longform plugin will get at both things, admittedly in relatively kludgy way. It treats specific folder-bound sets of notes as scenes in a draft, and those scenes can be manually dragged to reorder them, then a compile action can stitch them all together into a new note. The default compile steps strip links and such, but you can make a custom sequence that just retains the stitching together while retaining all markdown formatting.

First, based on https://github.com/OliverBalfour/obsidian-pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-Templates and https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/latex-template.html, I created a pandoc template in ~/.pandoc/templates/ and put this latex code in a mytemplate.latex file:

As an aside, if you do any sort of academic writing, the Zotero Integration + Pandoc plug-ins have been a game changer. It is quite an intense rabbit hole (at least for me as a humanities person) that took me to the command line, but one I’m glad I traveled down. In essence, it allows me to thoughtlessly create a fantastic first draft WITH an automatic bibliography…so, so nice to have.

As for markdown, it is much simpler than docx while having the basic formatting you'd need for writing. To export my markdown files to docx for web, I use the Pandoc extension, and you can also install and manage extensions and themes from within the app, so you don't need to code things in manually unless you want to add snippets, which there is plenty of help on the Obsidian forums.

There's a Pandoc plugin too, just so you know: https://github.com/OliverBalfour/obsidian-pandoc

You could use pandoc and specify the twocolumn option (please see https://stackoverflow.com/a/34809186). You could use pandoc standalone or use it through some Obsidian plugins (obsidian-pandoc, obsidian-enhancing-export)

Have you taken a look at obsidian-pandoc?

Have you checked out the Obsidian Pandoc plugin? I think it might meet your needs:

https://github.com/OliverBalfour/obsidian-pandoc

That being said standard Markdown does not provide notation for certain things, so it is somewhat up to interpretation how to convert certain features to standard Markdown.

It does look like the Pandoc plugin can combine documents by processing a master note and any related notes that are linked with the embed link syntax.