Convert a markdown file to docx with pandoc

Today I rediscover an amazing tool: pandoc, which correctly presents itself as

your swiss-army knife to convert files from one markup format into another.

In these days I am working on the redaction of a complex tender notice, which must be delivered as an editable docx and then exported (with all the fancy stuff and theming) into pdf. Unfortunately, I find the user experience of writing documents with Microsoft Word really unsatisfying and cluttered.

Therefore I decided to project this task to a space where I feel more comfortable: markdown editing. In doing so, I also took the chance to explore a nice tool I discovered some months ago: Obsidian.

Elephant in the room

The main question obviously was: can I easily (and perhaps nicely) convert my markdown sources into the requested docx format?

Pandoc to the rescue! With an awesome one-liner provided among the documented examples, the conversion takes seconds - and thanks to the --reference-doc option the reference theme is enforced with no effort.

pandoc --reference-doc reference.docx -o output.docx obsidian_vault/input.md

Of course, the above one-liner has been already listed as a target into the project Makefile.