This paper deals with output feedback and adaptive output feedback control design for input-affine nonlinear systems on the basis of Riemannian metrics. Firstly, an observer for the considered class of nonlinear systems is proposed. Then, it is shown that by combining the introduced observer with state-feedback controllers in a suitable way, output tracking can be achieved. Moreover, the obtained results are extended to be used for adaptive output feedback stabilization of uncertain nonlinear systems. The introduced adaptive controller is more general than the existing adaptive output feedback ones because it does not assume any constraint on the structure of the system and the parametric uncertainty. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control methods.