pandoc VS logseq

If you really want to go that route, take a look at pandoc and ping me if you have questions. Pandoc in combination with the Eisvogel LaTeX template can be a quick way to get a really good-looking doc.

I use Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) for a lot of things, including my RPG stuff, and there are options for exporting things as PDFs. It’s great for getting organized and doing research, but I would use other tools for long-form writing and layout. What I like about Obsidian though is that everything is done in Markdown (https://commonmark.org) and I can use Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) to transform the source to whatever I need. The caveat is that Obsidian uses a flavor of Markdown with some non-standard extensions, so a pure Markdown editor like Typora (https://typora.io) might be a better choice depending on your needs.

My second question is just checking my solution is at all sane. I'm using markdown to make my own character sheets for each playbook, including all the information I think prudent (happy to share if it'd help and not be sharing anything proprietary), and then using pandoc to convert these into word documents. I'm then just sharing these with my players and they can then edit them for their characters and update them as needs be. Is this a reasonable approach? Or is there a better approach?

Especially Haskell tools often live in proximity to nix as well, e.g., pandoc or xmonad.

Tried mkdocs and it is great; beautiful styling and both Markdown and reStructuredText can be used. It would be perfect if I could figure out a way to replace the Markdown -> HTML converter (probably python-Markdown?) with pandoc

You could use pandoc to convert it to a PDF, from which the first page could be extracted (e.g. via pdfseparate(1)) and then converted to an image (e.g. via convert(1)). But perhaps someone else has a more elegant suggestion.

How about https://pandoc.org/

I'm freelancing as a pandoc consultant, and I regularly get to fix bugs and to extend pandoc with additional functionality. My proudest work is the Lua subsystem, which is now used heavily, e.g. in Quarto.

Pandoc automatically converts many (many) formats into beautiful typeset PDF pages. It uses TeX internally, which is strongly-opinionated typesetting software that will largely ignore whatever spacing is in the input document & replace it with what a detail-oriented, perfectionist, founder of Computer Science thought math textbooks should look like in 1978, & it is beautiful.

...you are right! But Logseq is open source, and can also do the job very well for a diary, since it is based on a daly notes threads! And it provides many community plugins, if one wishes to extend its functionalities or modify the look and feel!

Take a look at Logseq. Its free, local first and you can easily back up by creating compressed archives of your vault(s) or by using Github. They will charge for a sync service at some point.

logseq - https://github.com/logseq/logseq/

This function exists in logseq under the name Macros.

Notes never really worked for me previously, but somehow I got it working with logseq (it doesn't really matter which Roam-like tool you use). I feels like some kind of super power to be able to quickly access all sort of information. What helped me was thinking in projects (prepare conference talk XYZ, write article for tech magazine ABC and of course actual projects). Also I always link persons I interact with when I create notes for a meeting or similar situations. That way you can quickly show all relevant information about a person. Most important though is the ability to write down TODOs anywhere and later see them in an aggregated manner.

[logseq]: https://logseq.com/

You can use the mobile Logseq app to edit org files on your phone.

Logseq

Logseq (version 61): platform for knowledge management and collaboration

FYI there are a lot of good tools like Obsidian if you want alternatives. Personally I use Logseq, but it's a power user tool that probably isn't a good fit unless you're really technical.