After five years of fighting with obsidian and plug-ins to get it to do things that I needed to for academic work I have finally done it. I switched to word and it is so simple.

@jonah The workflow I have settled on is that everything I write gets drafted in Notion (markdown) and lives there forever as my text copy. For anything that needs formatting it goes to Word. I don’t like word exactly, but it works and if I only use it for the formatting phase I’m fine.

@isaacgreene Commenting was my big need – ability for commenting as a) to-do b) collaborative feedback. plus Zotero integration. Obsidian plugin worked, but not enough to make me not nervous. Zettlr would be my choice if starting from scratch, but there too is a curve and this is a 15k words into a 100k project.

I didn’t like Notion at all, esp its lock-in (I have free edu access to it). Notesnook is far preferred. Obsidian still in use frequently for me with the Digital Garden plugin

@jonah Notion certainly has some drawback, but I do all my writing in it. The Notero API (Zotero + Notion) took some work, but that was a big plus. My main prob is no elegant footnote system, but I work around it with toggles (and I loooove toggles).

@JudsonGreene i guess i just got tired of an abundance of workarounds versus just using a non-favorite app

@jonah Makes total sense. I honestly wish I could think when I write in Word, but my research style is maximal enough I need a fast way to link to other pages of notes and toggle/hide material quickly. And also, alas, lots of white pixels please the little grey cells for some reason.