obsidian-pandoc VS obsidian-citation-plugin

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.

Does https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin maybe work for you?

I've been in contact with the creator of the Obsidian Citations plugin which you may have noticed has been relatively quite for the past year or so.

Another problem is that no matter how much I tried, the two available Zotero plugins for Obsidian do not work for me (this https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-zotero-integration and this https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin). I am not sure if that is because I'm on Linux, but they just don't work. However, RStudio on Linux works great with Zotero, and I can easily add citations using the Better BibTeX for Zotero plugin (https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex) to create citation keys. That way, I can simply copy/paste the citation key (e.g. '@lastname2020') in the text and have it render into the citation when I render the file in Rstudio. I sometimes write documents with > 300 references, and Zotero running in a Windows VM, trying to refresh a huge word document would take a long time, and would lead to corrupt citations. That's no problem with a markdown/Rmarkdown document.

I like it more than other options like Citation: https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin

There are several plugins to organize citations available for Obsidian, although you'd probably need to be willing to migrate your workflow (notes, citations, etc.) into it to get the most out of it.

How about this?

For (2) above, I use the reading note template provided by obsidian-citation-plugin.

6+7) Yes, that's correct! I read on the ereader (Boox NoteAir), then import annotations into Zotero (described above). The annotations are exported to Obsidian using the citations plugin (I could share my template, if you're interested). Now I have a markdown document with metadata and all the highlights. Then I can go through the (very time-consuming!) task of summarizing these highlights into notes. I write two types of notes: first a 'literature note' (one big one, some I'm not completely sticking to the Zettelkasten method here) with headings for each idea from the texts that I want to have a note on. I rewrite the highlights in my own words (and have the text open for reference while I do that), and sometimes I'll embed some highlights as quotes if I think it's nice to keep the original wording of the author there too. These literature notes stick closely to the original text; I won't add anything. The second type are like 'permanent notes'. In these, I might add ideas from other authors, my own ideas etc. Perhaps 'living notes' would be a better term, because this is where I try to synthesize ideas from different sources (and thus they'll constantly be expanded and rewritten as I read, learn and think more).