@jarango Everything true.

However, I disagree with #Markdown: https://www.karl-voit.at/2025/08/17/Markdown-disaster/

It's way more open than, let's say, #OneNote & so forth. Unfortunately, it's far from being a #textformat that can be reused anywhere without problems. At least I need to convert MD all the time from one flavor to a different.

With more and more #Obsidian add-ons introducing their own syntax elements, you will end up with clear text files you still can't convert for a different tool without modifications. Good luck with finding out which elements are going to survive and which not. For a few files, that seems OK. If you have a decent #PKM like you describe in your awesome #DulyNoted book, it requires more effort.

For everything I need to use with #MD, I keep a syntax file with one example element so that I keep an overview & know what to convert how in case I need to reuse information stored in this MD flavor.

With org, I just push it through #pandoc & I'm done. 🤷

#publicvoit #LML #Zettelkasten

"Potential #Markdown Data Loss When You Will Move Away from #Obsidian"
https://Karl-Voit.at/2026/04/08/obsidian-md-portability

In many discussions, users of tools like Obsidian did not understand the somewhat abstract/generic warnings in my article on Markdown: https://karl-voit.at/2025/08/17/Markdown-disaster

So I asked Claude to generate a concrete list of problematic #MD syntax elements when you will leave Obsidian.

Plain text is not everything. You still need to make sure that your (meta-)data survives conversions of problematic MD flavors to target formats like other MD flavors or (in my example) HTML.

Please do report back in case of LLM hallucinations.

Edit: there do seems to be issues with the LLM result. Until manually confirmed (this is going to be time-consuming), do not trust its output literally, get the idea behind the warning and check your own data with an example export.

#publicvoit #20260408_ObsidianMdPortability

@publicvoit There are a number of basic errors in this report, but since it's LLM-written I suppose I shall put as much effort correcting them as you put into generating them. Sigh.

There's an Obsidian extension for Pandoc so you can convert your Obsidian notes to any other format. It's no different than the workflow you described for Org mode.

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/pull/11135