It looks like a powerful combo. Back in the day I went the LaTeX path, nowadays I’ll be tempted to follow your approach.
I have tried Obsidian a couple of times, but it never stuck with me. For some reason I cannot go back to “regular editors” after years of vim (and now neovim), it is not only the modal editing (IIRC Obsidian has a decent vi mode), I guess it is more about having all your editing in the same tool (and the terminal).
Nowadays I stick to neovim plus Telekasten plugin, not as polished as Obsidian, but with enough features.
+1 for Obsidian, though until now I haven't felt the need to write actual papers in. Zotero + latexmk + vim + Skim/SumatraPDF mostly scratches that itch for me.
In practice the markdown to pdf conversion is performed by pandoc. Pandoc has functionality to recognise academic formatting styles (like APA, Harvard etc)
Pandoc also has functionality to turn a table of contents on based off of the semantic headers.
My guide is pulling together issues that arise across Zotero <> Obsidian <> Pandoc <> Word
I’ve found most forums are concerned with one or two of these steps depending which forums you’re visiting.
If anyone is trying to work out a Zotero to Obsidian to Word/Libre Office workflow, give it a look.
I’ve created a GitHub repo README with instructions on linking everything together.
Hopefully someone finds this useful, happy for more contributions also (hence why used a repo to do this)
https://github.com/evolve2k/obsidian-pandoc-academic-word-do...