pandoc VS obsidian-export

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.

I use this obsidian-export CLI program to convert prior to pushing to my repo and it's been working pretty well. This gives me a read-only version of my notes that is accessible from devices I don't have obsidian on (work laptop, for example).

If you limit your use of third party plugins, you can always use https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export for this as well. I originally built it for exactly this use case (but now also use it as a crucial step in my pipeline to publish content to my own website)

It came from here! https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export

If you add in obsidian-export as a build step (disclaimer: I'm the author), there is no need for people to change their Obsidian settings. Obsidian-export turns WikiLinks into regular Markdown links (and it flattens embedded notes) :)

Worth noting I maintain a project which does exactly this: https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export

I have similar folders to [Oudwin](https://www.reddit.com/user/Oudwin/)... - dm - _inbox - assets - checklist - communications - research-reference - elements - sessions Additionally, I have had reasonable success using [obsidian-export](https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export) to export my Obsidian vault to CommonMark. From there you have more options. I then build html pages using [mdbook](https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/) to control the information that is revealed to players. I am playing with using [MkDocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/) to see if it offers more control/flexibility. Regardless, the /elements folder contains all the lore chunks of the world including information I keep on the PCs. The /communications and /sessions folders can contain info with links to /elements that are revealed as needed. I make heavy use of transclusion ![[CoolThingFormAnotherFolder]] to keep it a bit more elegant and some custom styles are needed to make it how it look how I wish.

Shameless plug: obsidian-export. It will convert [[WikiLinks]] and ![[Embeds]] to plain Markdown (among a few other things) so you'll always have a way to go back if Obsidian doesn't work out the way you hoped.

So really you can't get what you want at all. You could try an external tool like this to export your notes to commonmark which is more widely supported. Ultimately if you are changing the path to files outside of obsidian (meaning they won't be automatically updated) you will break links. So maybe your best bet is to use wikilinks + an export tool.

If that's something you would miss, you could hook obsidian-export into a build pipeline to convert Obsidian-flavored markdown to regular Markdown (CommonMark, really).

While this would require an intermediate step, you could use https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export to convert to regular markdown understood by pandoc in the mean time (full disclosure: I'm the author)