I’ve been experimenting with different ways of converting a whole folder of obsidian markdown files to epub using pandoc. Here are some different options that I’ve explored.

The longform plugin is probably the go to option, but it comes with a workflow that doesn’t suit me. So I abandoned that for my little project.

The include-files.lua filter for pandoc. This might be the cleanest solution - you can just add it as an option in the standard obsidian exporter. But you might need some additional magic if you want to resolve wikilinks to images.

So i ended up using a custom python script that compiles a long command line for pandoc. It adds all the md files to the command line, sorts them, and adds all the folders . This will also resolve wikilinks by recursively adding a bunch of resource folders.

import glob
import re
import subprocess
import os

natsortkey = lambda s: [int(t) if t.isdigit() else t.lower() for t in re.split(r'(\d+)', s)]

natsort = lambda L: sorted(L, key=natsortkey)
  
files = glob.glob("manuscript/**/*.md",recursive=True)
files= natsort(files)

# To resolve wikilinks you need to add a list of search paths
resource_folders = glob.glob("**/",recursive=True)
resource_folders = ['.']+[os.path.abspath(f) for f in resource_folders]

cmd = ["pandoc", "-o", "Frankenstein.epub",
       "-B", "Titlepage.html",
       "--toc", "--css", "epub.css",
       "--resource-path", ';'.join(resource_folders), 
       "--embed-resources",
       "--from=markdown+wikilinks_title_after_pipe",
       "--epub-title-page=false",
       "--metadata","title=Frankenstein",
       ] +files

result = subprocess.run(cmd,capture_output = True, text = True )

print(result.stdout)
print(result.stderr)

Other alternatives considered:

  • The Easy Bake obsidian plugin - but it seems abandoned and i did not get it to work (but also gave up fast because i really dont want to bake it).
  • A shell script that does the same as the python script above.
  • A custom pandoc lua filter that does something similar.
  • Using the obsidian RunJS plugin to achieve something similar. It seemed to big effort to learn.