Export to latex project

Plugins ideas
1

I like writing my papers in Obsidian, but after my work is done (or to preview the output) I would like to export my project notes into a latex project.

I’m thinking about something like that:

/<project-folder>
/<project-folder>/references/
/<project-folder>/index.md
/<project-folder>/abstract.md
...
/<project-folder>/ieeeaccess.cls
/<project-folder>/template.tex

The plugin would consume the selected index.md file with the following structure:

# Abstract

![[Abstract]]

# Introduction

![[Problem statement]]

![[Use cases]]

![[Contribution]]

![[State of the art]]

# Background

![[Decentralized dispute resolution system]]

![[Proof to justice]]

![[Message Board]]

![[Pseudo-anonymous vs anonymous blockchain]]

![[Payment for services]]

![[Storage network]]

# The framework

![[The framework]]

# Security analysis

![[Security analysis]]

# Future work

![[Future Work]]

# Conclusions

![[Conclusions]]

and output a latex project with one index.tex, ieeeaccess.cls, and all other assets. I know that pandoc is the way to start from, but I see the following problems:

Linking

How to embed internal links ![[]] into a sections/subsections?

Bibliography

Bibliography would be identified by the bibex key-value in front matter, for example:

/references/Information Privacy Research.md

---
bibex: @article{smith2011information,
  title={Information privacy research: an interdisciplinary review},
  author={Smith, H Jeff and Dinev, Tamara and Xu, Heng},
  journal={MIS quarterly},
  pages={989--1015},
  year={2011},
  publisher={JSTOR}
}
---

And whenever I reference this note in some other note, e.g.

Therefore, we do not attempt to pick any definition of privacy; instead, we build on a more concrete concept that is anonymity [[Information Privacy Research]].

The plugin should recognise that this is not a section but a bibliography entry.

Abstract

This is a minor issue, but the abstract should be handled differently because in latex it’s usually embedded in \begin{abstract}...\end{abstract}.

Assets management

I’m not sure if pandoc can handle that properly.

What do you think about it? What am I missing? Is it worth doing?

1 Like
2

I am craving this plugin.

One point I disagree on it that the bibliography should be handled via the Citations Plugin/Zotero integration, so that whenever [[@citekey]] or [@citekey] appears it creates the correct citation.

The second thing is that there should be a strong dependence on latex templates, as is the case with standard pandoc. The templates should be able to govern the structure of the export.

I think that there would need some work on the pandoc side of things, because from what I know there is no support for wikilinks in pandoc. There would be a need for a new document format in pandoc, and it would need to be able to take many files as input. I do not know if that is feasible.

I hope this can get done, it would make paper-writing from obsidian really seamless.

3

You are right about the bibliography at the time of writing I didn’t know about the Zotero integration, [[@citeKey]] would be amazing.

1 Like
4

I wrote a plugin: GitHub - bingryan/obsidian-markdown-export-plugin: This plugin allows to export markdown to a folder., but there is no index.md for TOC

5

I also wrote a standalone tool for this in Julia: mscott99/Obsidian-Paper-Export: Export an Obsidian note to an academic paper format, including embedded content. (github.com). I someone wants to try using it let me know, I’ve only used it myself so far so it might be not very robust yet. It has many features though.

1 Like
6

:heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: Embedded content!!!