Curtis McHale runs an online book club where readers share their posts on the current book. He’s been using Longform in Obsidian but it kept corrupting his data organization so he decided to move to Emacs. His site requires Markdown but he decided to go all in on Org mode so he needed a way to convert his old Markdown posts to Org and then to export his Org files to Markdown.
Migrating from Markdown to Org was easily handled by Pandoc. When exporting from Org to Markdown there were a couple of problems. The easiest problem was smart quotes: " and ' are mapped to the HTML entities &ldquote;, &rdquote;, &lsquote;, and &rsquote;, which is not what McHale wanted. He fixed that by simply turning off with-smart-quotes.
The slightly harder problem was footnotes. The Org exporter handles them correctly but presents them as a Top Level heading, which doesn’t work for him because he has each post for a book as a separate subtree in the book’s Org file. He fixed that with a bit of post-processing that mapped # Footnotes to #### Footnotes.
His post has a video that shows him stepping through all this if you prefer a visual presentation. He uses Doom Emacs so that may be a bit disorienting to those who are used to vanilla Emacs.
In any event, it’s a nice post that shows how Emacs can easily handle tasks that you were using more complicated apps like Obsidian to do.