Taking class notes: obsidian vs. notion

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I really like Obsidian, I just discovered it a week ago, but for me its a big weakness that I cannot easily export my notes as pdf.
When I do, the layout of my notes is completly destroyed, since it cant “translate” many things such as my highlights or the Backlinks.

I dont have any tech background whatsoever (so pls go easy on me :')) and am now in a dilemma situation which app to use for my university notes.

Notion’s interface is more compact in my opinion, good to track things (or at least easier for me than with Obsidian), and i can export pdfs, for example in order to share my notes or print them.
Obsidian offers the for me very interesting and unique feature of creating my own encyclopedia and it’s less distracting than Notion and more focused on the actual content than aesthetics.

Now that I will attend university in a week I’d appreciate to know whether other people share this problem and what ways you found of solving it.

I imagine it would be awesome if directly from the start of my academic career I’d have begun creating my “virtual brain”, it might come in very handy in future!
That’s why I haven’t given up the wish to continue using Obsidian.

The only solution I thought of myself until now is that I in class write things down in Notion, and after class copy them to Obsidian and add the Backlinks etc.
But is this really the best way?
It would be highly appreciated to know your opinions and experiences!

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What’s your reason for exporting to pdf? What does that accomplish for you? Maybe you can get the same thing via a different method.

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Are you using the “Obsidian Enhancing export plugin” I noticed that it fails to render backlinks but the standard export to PDF seems to work fine in my test. Can you share an example of what you are trying to do?

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Hi Jana,
Nice to see, that there are more German users than me using Obsidian. :slight_smile:

Regarding you question: If you want to extract an Obsidian file as PDF, please try out the community plugin called “Pandoc plugin”.
Note: I don’t use it much.
But for me, it makes its job good. I only found out that emojis sometimes are missing if I used them inside of markdown formats and markdown links.

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pandoc plugin has the same as the other I mentioned. It appears to be an issue with Pandoc as they are unable to determine methodology and Obsidian apparently is the latecomer to the issue idea: include files (and csv tables) #553

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I figured out my problems with these plugins and that was the need to export with the HTML format which is essentially the Preview pane.

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