I am building a vault based on the content index of a book. Is there an easy and convenient way to create individual notes from/read in and convert the index list - other than doing it by hand, one by one?
Similar topics were discussed here:
And here:
Thing is, the options discussed there take a few hours to explore if you’re not a programmer. In the same time, one might as well simply create the notes by hand. Aren’t there any faster ways to do this? - Honestly, seems like such an elementary issue for a note-taking tool. Students that spend their days summarizing textbook chapters don’t want to open 300++ entries by hand if they can help it. …I guess.
Take care, and thank you for all the great work you guys are doing!
Often it feels like whatever we want is a basic, obvious feature that should exist, but that feeling isn’t a reliable guide. In this case, from what I’ve seen I’d guess that far fewer than half of all users will ever want to create hundreds or thousands of notes at once from a list of names.
I’d expect a student summarizing textbook chapters to use 1 note per book (maybe 1 per chapter).
For sure, and sorry if this sounded like I was complaining. I meant it more like “in nine of ten universes, I would count on something like this to exist”. I don’t have the foggiest idea about the technical circumstances, and I have never done anything on a computer that goes further than front-end usage. (I might even get the idiom wrong, here.)
My use case is the annotating or the expanding of existing texts. If I work with a book, I usually have an index that already structures it. If I want to copy that index/structure into Obsidian, however, as thing seem to be right now, I need to recreate the index by hand.
In the case of, say, a travel guide or a roleplaying book (I think I cited a book from Chaosium’s “Stormbringer” line as an example on the Discord), that’s a matter of minutes. - Of MANY minutes, but still of minutes.
As soon as we’re looking at a business report, though, or even at a learner’s textbook like Albing’s and Vossen’s “bash Cookbook”, where the index alone is some ten-something pages, then it becomes the kind of work that one would surely like to automate because it will take you an hour at least.
In practice, I guess this boils down to a case as depicted here, on Reddit:
I have a list in a word document with over 200 entries, I’d like to select all and create a note for each entry.
Example using grocery list.
Banana Orange Pears Eggs Olio
Select all and create a note for each entry.
In this thread, the plugin “Note Refactor” is mentioned, as well as in a couple of more recent discussions of the problem.
“Note Refactor” lets you split existing notes according to different parameters, like splitting a note by its headers. That’s a workaround, but still a very messy one, at least from my own (limited) experience:
You will auto-create a bulk of notes, yes, but you will have to spend a lot of time modifying the mother document to begin with. Also, the Note Refactor creations will tend to be imprecise - you will have to work through your results as well. – Which gets me personally back to the start: Then, if the plugin doesn’t really speed up the process, I might as well go back and create the notes by hand. Which, of course, is the situation I wanted to avoid in the first place.
If I were doing this, I would (based on the things I have experience with) use the command-line tool touch (on Mac and Linux; there’s probably an equivalent on Windows) to create the files from the list (assuming the file contains 1 name per line and nothing else).
Expanding on @CawlinTeffid (but also recognizing that you originally said you are not a programmer), if you really have a 1000 links you need to create there is a fairly elegant (for unix) command line option you could use (on mac, or linux, or windows with cygwin or wsl). Here’s an explanation (with a little help from 4o).
If you have a list of topics or items in a text file and want to create individual note files for each item in Obsidian, you can use a simple command line solution. This solution uses sed and xargs, which are available on most Unix-like systems, including macOS and Linux. Here’s how it works:
First, it appends .md to each line in your text file to create filenames for the notes.
Then, it creates these note files.
Finally, it generates a Markdown file with links to each of the notes.
To use this solution, open your terminal and navigate to the directory where your text file is located. Then run the following command, replacing index.txt with the name of your text file:
sed 's/.*/&.md/' index.txt | xargs touch && sed 's/.*/[[&]]/' index.txt > output.md
This command will create note files in the current directory for each line in your text file and generate an output.md file containing links to these notes. You can then open output.md in Obsidian to easily navigate to your newly created notes.
I meant it more like “in nine of ten universes, I would count on something like this to exist”. I don’t have the foggiest idea about the technical circumstances, and I have never done anything on a computer that goes further than front-end usage. (I might even get the idiom wrong, here.)
