This seems to be a great logseq workflow, if I can replicate in Obsidian. There are some workarounds for annotating but block referencing and indentation remain an issue.
This requires that obsidian implements robust URI natively. The plugin Advanced URI does this but this feature must be implemented natively. This is the main reason why I switched to Craft for the time being until the developers implement this.
Nonetheless the obsidian community is a great resource 
1 Like
A lot of people migrating from Citavi could make the jump once this is implemented. Logseq seems the example to follow.
1 Like
Would love to see this feature!
Liquid Text recently implemented this. Would be nicer to have something that works within Obsidian without the need to use another app for PDF management
I already made a similar request, however, it never got much attention.
I am at a loss as to why, but it seems there is not enough user demand for this feature to become a core feature. I hope I am proved wrong.
6 Likes
You can use the annotator plugin
+1
I think this feature makes a lot of sense for anyone who works with PDFs. Obsidian allows us to import PDFs, but unlike pictures, PDFs have a lot of pages. It can be hard to make use of information from different pages unless we can organize it according to our notes. In order to better incorporate PDFs into our notes, it would help if we could link specific paragraphs to notes.
simply highlight and annotation of pdf could already be realized by annotation and markmind plugin
As far as I know, annotator plugin doesn’t support area highlight or graph highlight
Use case or problem
When we have a pdf file added in a note and we want to write about a question, topic or anything else from the file in the notes, there is no way to link from the notes text directly to the content in the pdf file. I would be nice if we can create a link in the note which jumps directly to a page or section in a pdf file from the vault.
Proposed solution
My suggestion is a feature similar to that one which allow users create link to note sections. Therefore the user could add a page number or something else in the link definition which allows jumping directly to a text in the PDF file.
I would not like to see multiple links to the same file. What I want to is link to a pdf file already added in some other note. I do not want multiple links to the same pdf in multiple places. However, I can see value in both approaches for different scenarios.
Current workaround (optional)
None
Yeah, annotator plugin has a similar feature. But I see some issues:
- I need to highlight text to be able to create a link.
- The text generated in the note to allow me to create a simple link is very ugly
- I need a note just to open the file in the annotator. I would like to be able to create a link to any pdf embedded in some other note.
+1 Better integration with PDFs
1 Like
Citavi with high-level notes like Obsidian
or
Obsidian with Citavi-like PDF viewer/annotation management
would be my ideal thing. Citavi style approach of compiling multiple annotations into a simple knowledgebase is like magic
4 Likes
Expect to implement importing PDFs in Canvas for reading and to annotate any given text or paragraph, and the annotations can be composed into mind maps or other graphical relationships in Canvas. Different books can be put into the same Canvas, and these annotations will be recombined. This effect has been implemented by Marginnote and can be found at: Developer Stories - A Magical Pencil Box - How We Incorporated PencilKit into MarginNote 3.7 - YouTube
I use citavi5 before migrating to obsidian and Zotero. I have to say that citavi is the best one-stop academic reading and writing software except lack of flexibility. obsidian and Zotero gives me more freedom and function, but genuinely speaking I feel less productive and spending more time on drilling the knowledge management itself instead of discovering knowledge and experimenting on my own research field.
2 Likes
it would be great if the canvas in obsidian could have this feature, imaging what a magical reaction will happen when combining marginnote and liquidtext into a markdown-empowered text editor
+1 for something like in Logseq. The current solutions are either tedious or not elegant enough.
4 Likes
the development roadmap seems not direct in pdf annotation direction, still there are several plugins like annotator plugin, and markmind plugin that could do pdf annotation