obsidian-shellcommands VS obsidian-pandoc

Hovewer, it seems like there is a plugin which should help you achieve your goal: https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands

I really like Obsidian's live preview editor, however it isn't very good with table editing. That's why I used Shell Commands plugin to create shell commands (for macOS): one to open it in Typora to edit tables, and one to open in VS Code to do regex find and replace, including the ssmacro extension. ssmacro allows you to create JSON to specify operations like find and replace to do automatically, and trigger it with a hotkey.

I don't have a good experience with table editing either. What I ended up doing is using the Shell Commands plugin to create a shell command (for macOS) to open the note I'm currently working on in Typora:

Shell commands plug-in (https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands) works perfectly.

Happy to share some of what's been working for me. Some of this is stuff I'm actively using, some of it hasn't quite made it into the "day to day use" yet, but I've been experimenting with. (Random personal advice: Never let your note taking tools feel like using them is work, that's the first step towards not keeping notes!)

- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian

- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images

- For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis.

- More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power.

- Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222

- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files.

These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.

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.