I Love Obsidian But Hate Publishing From It: Here's My Solution

I use Obsidian every day. I have over a thousand notes in my vault. My graph view looks like a neural network. I have opinions about YAML frontmatter.

I'm not here to tell you Obsidian is bad. Obsidian is excellent. It might be the best tool ever made for personal knowledge management.

But every time I need to share something I've written in Obsidian with another person, I want to throw my laptop out the window.

What Obsidian gets right

Before I complain, let me be clear about why I use Obsidian in the first place.

It stays out of my way. Open a note, start typing. No loading screens, no syncing spinners, no "AI is thinking" delays. It's fast because it's local. It's simple because it's markdown.

Local files are underrated. My notes are .md files on my hard drive. I can open them in any text editor. I can version them with Git. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, every word I've written would still be right there, in a format that's been around since 2004.

The graph view actually helps. I was skeptical at first. But after a year of linking notes, the graph started revealing connections I hadn't noticed. Meeting notes linked to project specs linked to research papers linked to ideas I'd forgotten. It's the closest thing to an external brain I've found.

The plugin ecosystem is insane. Over 2,500 plugins at this point. Calendar views, Kanban boards, spaced repetition, citation managers, advanced tables. If you can imagine a workflow, someone's probably built it.

It's free for personal use. The core app costs nothing. No subscription, no freemium limitations, no "upgrade to unlock basic features" prompts.

I've tried Notion, Bear, Logseq, Craft, iA Writer, and several others. I keep coming back to Obsidian because nothing else matches the combination of speed, local storage, and extensibility.

Where it falls apart: the moment you need to share

Here's a scenario I run into at least twice a week.

I write something in Obsidian. Meeting notes, a project brief, a technical spec, a weekly update. The content is good. The formatting is clean (in Obsidian). Now someone else needs to read it.

This is where the pain starts.

Copy-paste destroys everything. I select all, copy, paste into Google Docs. My headings show up as lines starting with ##. Tables become walls of pipe characters. Code blocks are gone. Bold text is a coin flip. I just spent 30 minutes writing something polished, and the paste output looks like a text file from 1995.

If I copy from Reading Mode instead of Edit Mode, some formatting transfers, but it's inconsistent. Headings might paste as bigger text, but they're not real Google Docs heading styles. They don't appear in the document outline. Tables are a gamble.

Obsidian Publish solves the wrong problem. Obsidian's own publishing solution costs $8 to $16 per month. For that price, you get a website hosted on publish.obsidian.md.

A website. Not a Google Doc. Not a Word file. Not a Slack message. Not an email.

When my manager asks for the project update in a Google Doc, "here's a link to my Obsidian Publish site" is not a helpful response. When a client needs the report in Word, a web link doesn't cut it. When I need to drop a summary into Slack, I need it formatted for Slack, not formatted for the web.

The plugin dependency problem. There are community plugins that try to help. Pandoc Plugin for Word export. Slackify Note for Slack. Copy as HTML for email (though it hasn't been updated in years). Each one handles a specific destination, has its own quirks, and may or may not work with the current Obsidian version.

I don't want to maintain five different export plugins for five different destinations. I just want to share what I wrote.

The 10-minute reformatting tax. Every time I share an Obsidian note, I end up spending 5 to 15 minutes reformatting the content in the destination app. Reapplying heading styles in Google Docs. Rebuilding tables manually. Cleaning up code blocks. Converting markdown links to actual hyperlinks.

That time adds up. If I share notes three times a week and spend 10 minutes reformatting each time, that's 26 hours a year spent on something a computer should handle.

The fix: stop asking Obsidian to do what it wasn't built for

After months of frustration, I realized the problem wasn't Obsidian. Obsidian was never designed to be a publishing tool. It was designed to be a thinking tool. And it's exceptional at that job.

The mistake was expecting Obsidian to handle the last mile: getting my notes into other people's apps, properly formatted, without manual reformatting.

My workflow now uses two tools, each doing what it's best at.

Obsidian for writing. I write everything in Obsidian. Notes, drafts, project documents, research. The vault stays exactly as it is. No changes to my setup, my plugins, or my workflow.

Unmarkdown for publishing. When a note needs to go somewhere else, I copy the markdown from Obsidian and paste it into Unmarkdown™. Then I pick the destination.

That's it. The entire additional step takes about 15 seconds.

What the workflow looks like

1. I write my document in Obsidian, same as always.
2. When it's ready to share, I switch to Source mode and copy all (Cmd+A, Cmd+C).
3. I open unmarkdown.com and paste.
4. I see the formatted preview on the right. If I want to polish it, I pick a template or run an AI action to tighten the language.
5. I click the destination: Google Docs, Word, Slack, Email, OneNote, or Plain Text.
6. I paste into the destination app. Formatting is correct. Headings are real headings. Tables are real tables. Done.

If I need to publish to the web instead of paste into an app, I click Share > Publish and get a clean URL with whatever template I chose.

Why this works better than the alternatives

The key insight is that Unmarkdown™ is destination-aware. It doesn't just convert markdown to HTML. It converts markdown to the specific format each app expects.

Google Docs gets real heading styles that appear in the document outline. Slack gets mrkdwn syntax (single asterisks for bold, angle brackets for links) because Slack doesn't use standard markdown. Email gets inline CSS because email clients strip <style> tags. Each destination is handled differently because each destination works differently.

No single Obsidian plugin does this. You'd need a different plugin for each destination, and even then, most of them only handle a subset of the formatting.

What I'm not doing

I'm not leaving Obsidian. I'm not migrating my vault. I'm not changing how I write or organize my notes.

Obsidian and Unmarkdown™ are complementary tools, not competitors. Obsidian is where I think. Unmarkdown™ is where I publish. They serve different moments in the writing lifecycle, and trying to collapse them into one tool means one of the two jobs gets done poorly.

If Obsidian ever ships a native "Copy for Google Docs" button that produces real heading styles and native tables, I'll use it. Until then, this two-tool workflow is the best solution I've found.

The cost math

For context: Obsidian is free for personal use. Unmarkdown™'s core converter (paste markdown, copy formatted output for any destination) is free with no account required.

Obsidian Publish, which only outputs to the web, costs $96 to $192 per year. Unmarkdown™ Pro, which adds 62 templates, unlimited AI editing, full publishing with custom URLs, and file downloads, costs $96 per year.

I was already paying for Obsidian Publish before I found this workflow. I cancelled it. The annual cost is the same, and I can now send my notes to six destinations instead of just the web.

Try it with one note

If you're an Obsidian user and any of this resonates, just try it once. Open your most formatting-heavy note (the one with tables, code blocks, and headings). Copy the markdown. Go to unmarkdown.com. Paste. Click "Google Docs." Paste into a Google Doc.

The difference between that and your normal copy-paste experience will tell you everything you need to know.

Try the Unmarkdown plugin for Obsidian

Unmarkdown is now available as an Obsidian community plugin. Right-click any note and copy it formatted for Google Docs, Word, Slack, OneNote, Email, or Plain Text, directly from your vault. You can also publish notes to the web with 62 templates.

How to install (Community Plugins directory approval pending):

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release
2. In your vault, create the folder .obsidian/plugins/unmarkdown/
3. Move the three downloaded files into that folder
4. Open Obsidian Settings > Community Plugins > Enable "Unmarkdown"
5. Go to Settings > Unmarkdown > Click "Connect account" to link your free Unmarkdown account

Once approved for the Community Plugins directory, you can install by searching "Unmarkdown" in Obsidian's plugin browser.

Related reading

• Obsidian vs Unmarkdown: When You Need Documents, Not Digital Gardens
• The Complete Guide to Exporting Obsidian Notes
• How to Share Obsidian Notes With Anyone (Even Non-Obsidian Users)
• What is Markdown Publishing? (And Why It Matters in 2026)
• The Document Your AI Never Forgets: Persistent Knowledge with MCP