hey, I do all my readings inside of obsidian, I like being able to select something in the pdf, right clicking and copying the selection as a quote, I was wondering if i could make the selection and use some keybind to automatically append that quote to a file associated with that pdf?
I have tried using ai to create templater templates but I haven’t been able to make them work on pdfs.
Try PDF++ plugin to extract or link to highlights. Not sure about Templater automation in there. It may be possible although I don’t see Pdf++ API implemented so some custom hook should be used – not for the average user.
Hi,
what operating system are you using? I have a rather cool automated script that copies quotes from PDFs stored in Zotero to Obsidian, but I’m on Linux, and I don’t know how to convert to being useful in Windows or Mac.
hi, I am on debian
Oh nice! Do you use Zotero? My script relies pretty heavily on Zotero and the Better BibTeX plugin.
Zotero organizes your PDFs and gets all the metadata, and also you can read the PDF and highlight passages and annotate in the built-in reader. The BetterBibTeX plugin gives each item in Zotero a unique citekey, meaning an identifier that only one entry, e.g. a PDF, has.
My workflow is that my Obsidian source notes get that citekey as the note title, and then my script uses that in order to either locate an existing note and transfer a citation/highlighted passage into Obsidian (from Zotero), or if there’s no note with that title yet (meaning I’ve not yet copied any quotes from a source) then it creates a templated note (with all the metadata you want) and then pastes that quote into that newly created note.
Before I explain my script in more detail, does this sound useful? I don’t mind sharing, but it’s a little involved to get set up, but works flawlessly when done right 
If the conversation is on to Zotero, any objections toward using the Zotero Integration plugin which was last updated on Aug 11, 2024, but I haven’t heard about it breaking…?
I don’t know about it breaking, but my impression from that plugin was that it only gives you the metadata, no? So you set a template with the metadata you’d like to import into Obsidian and then the plugin gets that from Zotero. Unless I didn’t understand the plugin it can’t import citations individually or dynamically, can it?
It is used to bring in annotations (text and images) as well as tags, depending on the template.
Tons of stuff can be found here:
You may want to get a taste on the top of the thread, scroll down to the bottom and move your way up from there again.