Air Quotes plugin - Instantly insert full quotes from a source text. Also includes an ePub to Obsidian note convertor

Yes, I probably missed the right name of the folder. :see_no_evil: Thanks!

And thank you for the update!

Wow, this is very cool!

@AlanG, sorry for replying only now - you have posted in a thread I created a while back but I have only just discovered your answer.

I have just installed your plugin and imported my first epub. This is a really useful plugin!

What I wondered: As far I see, footnotes and other linked references are lost. Is there maybe a way to implement this? It would make this incredibly useful converter a fully rounded extension to Obsidians growing arsenal of perfectly honed tools.

Hi @zettelstraum, thanks for the nice feedback :slight_smile:

Regarding the ePub import, as per the docs this is considered feature-complete for the purposes of importing eBooks for use as the source text for quotations.

For more advanced control of your ePub to Markdown import you can use one of the many existing fully-featured tools, such as Pandoc or Calibre. This will allow you to get the footnotes and linked references as you want them.

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Hi Alan, May I ask if it supports file sources in other languages? Because when I try to insert a fragment from a Simplified Chinese book (imported as an md file), I can find the corresponding paragraphs in the first dialog box, but when I press enter and reach the dialog box to select the length of the text, I only see blank content. I have tested another Simplified Chinese book, and I encountered the same issue. I have also tested your ā€œPride and Prejudiceā€ example file, and it works fine. Thank you!

Thanks - what is the character which separates sentences in Simplified Chinese? Thatā€™s most likely the issue, Iā€™ll need to update the extractor to correctly detect Chinese sentences.

Thank you, Alan! Chinese punctuation marks and English punctuation marks have some different ranges in Unicode encoding, and they also have some visual differences.

Hi @sunzhengang - yes, so what are the Chinese punctuation marks / unicode characters? I need to update the code to handle them.

hi Alan, this is what I got from ChatGPT for yopur reference :blush::
Character Set: Chinese typically uses Unicode encoding, while English uses ASCII encoding. Unicode encoding encompasses characters from around the world, including Chinese and English characters.

Symbol Encoding: Chinese punctuation marks and English punctuation marks have different ranges in Unicode encoding. Chinese punctuation marks usually fall within the range of U+3000 to U+303F, while English punctuation marks fall within the range of U+0020 to U+007E.

Symbol Style: Chinese punctuation marks and English punctuation marks also have some visual differences. Chinese punctuation marks are usually full-width characters, occupying two character widths, while English punctuation marks are usually half-width characters, occupying only one character width.

Usage Habits: Chinese and English also have differences in the usage of punctuation marks. Chinese punctuation marks typically have a space between each character and the punctuation mark within a sentence, while English punctuation marks are usually directly connected to words without a space.

These are some basic differences in character sets, symbol encoding, symbol style, and usage habits between Chinese and English punctuation marks. Understanding these differences can help you correctly handle and display punctuation marks in mixed Chinese and English texts.

Hi, is it possible to have sources to pull quotes from in a note? I tried, but it only identifies the last source_text.

Is this plugin still supported? When I get to the step in the process where I should see a preview of the quote I selected and modify with up/down arrows, no text appears in the quote box.

Yes, still working without issues on the latest version of Obsidian.

You might need to provide some more detail / screenshots about the issue youā€™re seeing.

Of course - any note you link to will work as source text. A book in Markdown format is the same as a normal note.

Hi Alan!
Thank you for your work, I really enjoy the idea of this plugin, and it does wonders with texts in lagunages with latin alphabet! Yet, sadly it stops working as I try to use it for texts written in languages in Cyrillic alphabets, could you look into it, please?
(It was already reported as a bug on github, but I decided to write it here as well)

Hi @Cheesus , if itā€™s the same as the issue on Github, could you provide any additional information about how Cyrillic language texts are constructed? What is the character to mark the end of a sentence, if not one of ., ?, !, which are already supported.

Hi, thanks for the follow up, itā€™s the same punctuation sings that we use, namely

. , ? ! ā€˜ " ā€” ā€“ -

Otherwise it is letters. I donā€™t think there is anything special on the top of it.
Iā€™m not sure whether my answer is useful, but just in case here is a demonstration of how the problem looks. And I can try provide any other information if needed, e.g. an example of a book.

I donā€™t know what Iā€™m doing wrong. The air quotes window pops up, but there are no results found. Iā€™m trying to add quotes from a transcript note in my vault. Any help would be appreciated

Hi @swin youā€™ll have to send a lot more details, maybe some screenshots.

I just tested in the Sandbox vault by:

  1. Open Sandbox vault
  2. Install Air Quotes
  3. Add a source_text property in the welcome note pointing to [[Create your first note]]
  4. Open the command palette and choose ā€œAir Quotes: Insert quoteā€
  5. Start typing ā€œcreate aā€

And it worked fine. So maybe give that a test and see if you can figure out what youā€™re doing differently.

I got it working. Thank you so muchā€¦ I was confused by Step 3, but I figured it out