Show HN: I built an Obsidian plugin to create notes from BibTeX | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built an Obsidian plugin to create notes from BibTeX

github.com

With this plugin you can create literature notes from BibTeX entries, display formatted reference lists, and instantly generate citations.

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Great to see this. I’m using better-bibtex and the citation plugin currently in an extended workflow I’m calling the Obsidian Academic Stack. Would love to know if your plugin could enhance the stack.

What is the Obsidian Academic Stack?

I’ve been working on a stack which allows a workflow from Zotero > Obsidian > Pandoc > Word (with proper citations).

The idea being that essays and thesis can be written using Obsidan and then exported to word to be compatabile with the needs of other academics.

One key insight was that Pandoc supports Citation Style Language (CSL) so you need a workflow that supports CSL end-to-end if you want that a valid bibliography and in-text citations to pop out the end.

Here’s my overall workflow:

All your academic papers are saved into Zotero along with references to books, websites etc.

Zotero is synced to Obsidian, which lets you write papers and notes in Obsidian and add references to sources from Zotero.

So now you want to convert one of your Obsidian notes into an "academic paper". The tool you need for this is pandoc. The pandoc tool understands many academic referencing styles such as APA7 and Harvard. Specifically you install the pandoc plugin for Obsidian and configure that.

Once the pandoc plugin is setup; On the note you want to convert to an 'academic paper' you can run the pandoc command and it will generate a Word Document that automatically includes correct inline referencing and an auto-generated references section with all the references listed, at the end of the document.

I’ve been documenting it all here. Please star and raise an issue if you need any help setting this up.

https://github.com/evolve2k/obsidian-pandoc-academic-word-do...

Thank you very much for this guide.

I don't know if this falls under your project scope, but I have a suggestion.

By default, Obsidian saves links in notes using the "shortest path" , which reduces compatibility: the links don't work in anything but Obsidian.

I found two plugins that manage relative links:

https://github.com/val3344/obsidian-update-relative-links

https://github.com/dy-sh/obsidian-consistent-attachments-and...

Thanks. I’m wondering if this is somewhat related to the embedding images issue I discuss. Seems like obsidian was doing weird path reference logic. Could you give the ‘Embeds your images’ section of my README a read and see if you think it’s related.

Happy to include but could you unpack the problem / solution a bit more cause I mostly get it but not fully there.

I've had a bit of a read, seems a key benefit is if you want to host your markdown library into say Github or onto the web.

Adding one of these "Consistent Attachments and Links" libraries makes the links more explicit and hence more portable.

I think that's pretty desirable, I'll add a discussion on my project, feel free to raise other topics in discussion any time folks.

https://github.com/evolve2k/obsidian-pandoc-academic-word-do...

There is a project called papaja that is relatively mature.

I do the same except in Emacs. If it is useful, see the pandoc command I've created in .emacs to enable output to multiple formats.

I’m not really very familiar with using emacs. Could you link us to a file? Thx

This is very interesting, following. I wrote about this issue a little a week or two back. Lots of people making tools (both software and plugins) for what we might call the open-source information management ecosystem, but far fewer people taking a big-picture view and working out how to use these tools to make effective workflows.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313143

So happy to see that Obsidian has a thriving plugin ecosystem. Been considering creating an Obsidian plugin as an excuse to learn typescript, but every time I wonder whether a plugin for $foo exists, the answer turns out to be yes.

Do it. TS is fun ;-) There's a lot yet to be done around Obsidian and LLMs, like extracting text from images, selecting text and generating images, etc

So Obsidian gets all the benefits of a thriving ecosystem, makes a lot more money and the plugin creators get none of the benefits? It's a bit unfair isn't it?

Seems totally legitimate to me. The plugin creater has a superb distributed editor with lots of capability that they choose to add to.

I note that obsidian itself is free. I pay for the built-in sync as that's cheaper than implementing it myself, and there are other paths to sending the developers money, but they're all optional.

I’ve been wanting an obsidian plug-in that deprecates text and it doesn’t exist.

Simple idea: mark entire notes or portions of notes as “deprecated” and then have a toggle button that shows/hides deprecated text.

Interested to try it out. I've been using https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin

You can link directly to the plugin in Obsidian by its ID. It can make the install part of the readme more compact.

https://obsidian.md/plugins?search=bibtex-manager

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