Notion vs obsidian: why obsidian is the clear winner for academic and technical writing
I mentioned previously that I’ve been going back and forth between Notion and Obsidian. I had almost convinced myself that I would work entirely within the framework of Notion. This includes drafts for ideas, emails, research notes, annotations, and all sorts of things. That works. But I also convinced myself that I would write my academic papers within Notion. To be fair, even though I have to look up a reference from BibDesk and add it in Markdown style back into Notion, this is not too much of a problem. (This is in contrast to the citations plugin in obsidian that has a pull up menu for inserting references without leaving the editor and the current file.) It’s completely doable, especially with a tool like
https://github.com/dsanson/bibdesk-pandoc-export-templates
However, as I mentioned previously, there are a couple of minor annoyances with Notion that make it slightly less ideal. For one thing, it’s the fact that Markdown mathematics using latex code in Notion uses the double dollar style instead of the single dollar style used practically in every other Markdown preview document. So, this makes it a bit of a hassle. If I extract some source from one of my papers and put it in, then none of the math is going to be displayed correctly.
This is not a big deal in some circumstances. If your paper doesn’t have any math, as in the case of a recent layperson summary of some of the results from our lab that I had to prepare, I was able to work perfectly within Notion. It just had a few equations, but overall, that didn’t hinder the readability or flow of documents.
But then things start to add up. Unless this is text only, the annoyances with Notion lacking full markdown support start becoming a bigger issue. For example, if you want to attach images within Notion, with the exception of an image file, PDFs don’t display completely and the software leaves it as an attachment. You can put a caption on it as you could do with any file. But as I said, the whole point (for me) of using markdown in an academic setting is that then I can use the markdown latex package and typeset the entire document using LaTeX and some of the beautiful templates you have for LaTeX. But this is only possible if I follow one or two idiosyncrasies of how the latex markdown package works. For instance, when I attach an image, I need to follow a very specific syntax:
So this is completely accepted by Obsidian, and it displays the file correctly no matter whether it’s PDF or PNG or a JPEG. But because Notion hides the markdown in the actual interface, there is no way to actually do this. So you can’t really work with image files in a way that is fully compatible with ultimately typesetting with LaTeX. Put this together with the fact that there is no syntax highlighting for references, and it makes it look like one bland document. As a result of all of this, it becomes completely unreadable beyond a few paragraphs.
So having worked with text-only documents and then finally using one with a bit of math and images and references, I can safely say that Notion is not really workable for long-form writing and technical writing in the academic environment. I can’t really imagine someone else coming out of a more convincing argument because all the ingredients you need for reading and working: the bibtex keys, syntax highlighting, especially for citations, being able to add custom commands, especially to make the markdown compatible with LaTeX, and finally being able to add image files makes it a non-workable solution for documents that ultimately need to be typed in LaTeX using the markdown package.
Now one final issue with all of this is that, of course, in Notion, you don’t actually have a handle to the markdown file. You only get this using the export option. So every time you have to make a change, depending on how it’s displayed in the LaTeX typeset pdf, you have to manually go make the change in Notion, export it, and then do the whole process again. This makes it infeasible for academic and technical writing. Whereas in Obsidian, of course, the file is stored locally, and you can even set up a folder in which you can typeset the LaTeX document directly with the file as you’re editing it. And so, I think I have a conclusive answer to this workflow question.
Notion is still great for brainstorming and short drafts of course, but the actual writing for longer documents needs to happen in obsidian.
