Obsidian interoperabilty with which tools?
Since a lot of potential feature requests might relate to interoperability improvements, I’m wondering to what extent these are likely to be welcomed. Have Obsidian developers expressed that they value interoperability the way so many of us users do?
There are many possible subsets of tools depending on one’s use case(s).
During the discussion of links (now closed) there was mention of other note taking apps and wikis. But, my understanding/opinion is that the concept of Zettlekasten is about publication.
If all you intend to publish to is GitHub or a Wiki then compatibility requirements are fairly low. But, if one wants to publish to Journals that have manditory styles for citations and text one needs support for publication tools that support those journals. A reference manager such as Zotero and a publicationtool for rendering markdown into a style a journal will accept?
So, what markdown publication tools does Obsidian support?
For example, does Obsidian markdown interoperate with PanDoc?
https://pandoc.org/
Pandoc Markdown
https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#pandocs-markdown
My introduction to markdown was through Coursera’s Data Science certification where I learned RMarkdown (.rmd) and GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM). We were learning the statistical language R and using the RStudio IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to create markdown documents with fenced code blocks of R code and the output (both text and graphics) of R programs. RStudio converted its own dialect of markdown RMarkdown (.rmd) to standard markdown (.md). It was good practice to have a seperate file format for program specific markdown extensions (anyone for .omd?). RStudio/Posit (the corporation) has a new program called Quarto that has .qmd files.
When it comes out, I would like to use the Quarto Visual Editor to create Obsidian notes (currently “Visual Editor” is just an configuration in RStudio ultimately Quarto Visual Editor will be a separate product). Quarto (using Pandoc) can output to several markdown/wiki formats:
Pandoc supports a huge array of output formats, all of which can be used with Quarto. To use any Pandoc format just use the format
option or the --to
command line option.
Markdown formats:
GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) is the dialect of Markdown that is currently supported for user content on GitHub.
CommonMark is a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown.
Hugo is an open-source static website generator.
Docusaurus is an open-source markdown documentation system.
Markua is a markdown variant used by Leanpub.
Quarto - All Formats
Wiki formats
MediaWiki is the native document format of Wikipedia.
DokuWiki is a simple to use and highly versatile open source wiki software that doesn’t require a database.
ZimWiki / Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages.
Jira Wiki is the native document format for the Jira issue tracking and project management system from Atlassian.
XWiki is an open-source enterprise wiki system.
Quarto - All Formats
In short, for me, Quarto compatibility would be nice, but Pandoc compatibility at some level would be essential. I would be more tolerant of app specific/Obsidian specific extensions if they were in a separate file format extension such as .omd and there was a tool to export to a markdown format Pandoc understands.
What programs to you need Obsidian to be compatible with?
And would Pandoc help with that compatibility?