So I tried to do my best to tackle the tricky problem of creating a better working and better feeling Cornell Notes plugin experience in Obsidian. Cornell Notes are quite complicated to build an extension for and I’m not the most sophisticated IT-guy…
Perhaps this is why I started to get this project running, to learn something useful along the way.
I am glad that I came across this post, get to learn about the Cornell system for the first time. Also lot more to learn. I searched the community marketplace, seems like you are the first one to build a plugin for this system for note taking. (Although I think there are snippets or some other resources might be available in the community). So, in short, this plugin idea seems to have a good potential. One possible feature is, instead of opening an editor and renderer side-by-side, the renderer itself, can become the editor, just like Obsidian’s live editor. So, we can take notes on multiple topics side by side in their custom tabs. This can be done…
Anyway, the main reason why I joined this discussion, as I am really interested in how you achieved the layout rendering from the markdown content. Is it all custom styling?
Because, I wanted to create such a plugin, where I can write research papers (the two sections layout format), because its so simple to just write markdown content compared to starting a latex project. I understand that, even if we build such kind of plugin, it will take time to perfect it, because the automatic feature we get in latex like auto-numbering the pages, headers/footers, etc. is really helpful. But, still I always wonder whether markdown can someday replace latex.
Thanks for your feedback.
I’ve uploaded added a 2nd .gif so you can see what it is capable of right now.
I’m not shure if I will be able to get all the coming suggestions and additional features integrated.
I’ve made some design choices, that can get the most important things done I guess:
make view more or less 100% looking the way it would look like beeing in printed version A4 & US Letter
making it a bit more flexible with section geometry (sometimes you need more summary space an less notespace)
making working with it convenient: so you don’t have to type in all the settings again and again, after chosing the right ones for a file.
and some other stuff
LaTeX / Mermaid / Code integration, is rendered externally (online, so the newest features are available) and sent back to the Page splitview and will be scalable afterwards.
.jpg and .png integration, with individual scaling capability
common markdown table integration
some things are custom made, because otherwise I couldn’t have get it done that easy - but I try to strictly limit those cases. Example: Put this in the markdown code, then: “- - -” content below this marker will appear in the same section on another page. And if you use this in the .md file for the first time: it’ll create a new page at the same time in the Page view mode in the splitview. So this is also for kind of user convenience reasons.
I am still working on this thing… but some things I am not capable of for sure, because I worked in another space (until I got the layoff) but have a background in business informatics. Working on this project for quite some time… with lots of failures and roadblocks.
I think soon I’ll be able to get it to a 1.0 stage. So thanks for every comment…
I ‘m thinking about also implementing an Anki support / export function for each note. So you can use your notes to create multiple Anki cards from one .md Cornell Notes file. The ‘Cues/Keywords’ section contains the questions part for the Anki card and the ‘Notes’ or ‘Summary’ section contains the answers to a question. So no more copying and pasting, just press a button and a file is created that just needs to be imported by Anki.
What do you think?
It was is and will be a pretty intense and exhausting journey, but I think it was will be worth it. Going the extra mile…
Because Anki and the Cornell method have a few important things in common. Building a bridge between the two methods could be an added benefit for some lots of users.
Showcase: Positioning text and objects (Text, Codeboxes, diagrams, tables, formula, pics) in Cornell notes next to each other horizontally. Flexible spacing… of objects globally and individually too.
(here in: US-Letter format)
One of the main problems with digital note taking in class was always the inefficency and time consumption (mostly after class to transcribe the notes in scientific subjects, which are not so text heavy). Now with AI integration it’s possible to get beautiful CornellNotes done in class in real-time! Even if your teacher is quite fast with chalk and board. You can use messy notes and send it to your LLM of choice. You can even run it locally on a laptop, because those standard tasks don’t need the most memory hungry models. You can use it even without expensive API subscriptions. As of now, I’ve tested it with a totally free API version from Openrouter and the paid version of gemini-2.5-flash.
Usage: You set up your API connection (free or from your subscription, online or with your local running open source model on your laptop or Mac or PC) within the plugin and do short messy notes on the fly in class, then select those and send them via shortcut to your LLM API. Then you can listen to your teacher and follow the explanations (because you’ll have to wait between 15 seconds and a minute) and your diagram appears first as cryptic code in your .md file and in the split-screen view in the notes section of your Cornell markdown note. You don’t need to understand that code or even generate it during class yourself. You can follow the teachers explanations for vector addition and after 35 seconds the .svg is generated! You can scale it up or down, just as needed. No more editing after class, you have print-ready, book-quality graphics often in less than a minute. You can use your native language too, as the LLM does typically understand german, english, japanese, chinese, french or whatever… but I’ve just tested it with german and english, as I’m living in the swiss-german speaking part of Switzerland.
It seems I’ve been creating a quite useful tool… so far. But still needs quite a lot of testing… as you can see above… some german messy notes, giving it to the LLM and testing different subjects: graph theory, quadratic and cubic equation plots. Plotting: Inequalities and solution sets for solving linear inequalities graphically and other subjects and use cases.
german / english messy note as LLM input:
zeichne Geometrie: Pythagoras Dreieck, mit Flächenvergleich
Draw: Geometry: Pythagorean Triangle, with area comparison
