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Using Pandoc to export to Obsidian markdown? (self.obsidianmd)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by DrakeRichards to c/obsidianmd

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Does anyone have a good setup/configuration for converting documents to Obsidian-flavored markdown with Pandoc? I’ve been fiddling with it for a few hours but can’t seem to get everything right:

Obsidian markdown doesn’t support ^superscript^. I can get Pandoc to use sup instead by allowing raw_html, but then…
Image embeds don’t work. Pandoc wants to use img for some reason, and no matter what relative src I use the image just won’t show up.

I could fix all of this by running the files through a linter of some sort, but I feel like I’m missing something. Surely someone must have had these issues before me, right?

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[–] DrakeRichards 3 points 1 year ago

I got this mostly working, but it was not easy. Not only does Obsidian have a few peculiarities that make it less compatible with standard Markdown, but Word also does a few funny things.

Here's the config.yaml I used for Pandoc:

from: docx
to: markdown-smart-simple_tables-multiline_tables-grid_tables+pipe_tables+yaml_metadata_block-superscript-subscript-bracketed_spans-native_spans-link_attributes-raw_html+rebase_relative_paths+four_space_rule
extract-media: "./"
wrap: preserve
markdown-headings: atx
tab-stop: 2
shift-heading-level-by: 1
standalone: true
template: obsidian.md
filters:
  - compact-list.lua
  - remove-single-characters.py
  - remove-extra-linebreaks.py
metadata:
  tags: "tags/go/here"

The three filters:

Removed extra linebreaks added between bulleted lists to make them more compact.
Removed lines with only a single character in them. Usually an invisible character like nbsp, which made Pandoc's linter not remove them automatically.
Removes linebreaks enclosed in Strong tags. This is an artifact from Word where a line is bolded but has no content: technically the line break is bolded.

I then ran the resulting file through a RegExp replacement to change the superscript carats into HTML sup tags.

Even after all this, I still have to go through with an Obsidian plugin to convert the standard Markdown links and embeds into [[Wikilink]] style, since Obsidian will only do one or the other throughout your whole vault.