Cornell Notes plugin (modified)

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Hey, I got layed off some time ago…

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.

Here’s what I’ve been able to figure out so far: What do you think?
First results can be found here:
github Obsidian-App-Cornell-Notes-extension
(you can find an .pdf and .md file, showing current capabilities) → short_animation.gif & Animation2.gif

Cornell_Note_example.md

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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.

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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…

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I extended capabilities, now supports:

  • Chemical Formulas
  • drawing chemical molecules with individual sizing by |0.5 (%-age Value)
  • more picture file formats: .gif .webp .bmp & .svg
  • indented lists
  • fixing some minor layout issues

Integrating professional chemistry support was quite painful and exhausting, but learned some stuff on the way.

You can use the links above, they are still valid. Updated: .pdf, .md and added the .webp .bmp & .svg files to my repository.

what do you think, is it looking good so far? And is it looking like a 1.0 Version already? Are additional features needed?

Feedback is appreciated… Thanks!