This is strange. Here’s what “Show debug info” shows:
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.1.9
Installer version: v1.1.9
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 21.6.0: Mon Aug 22 20:19:52 PDT 2022; root:xnu-8020.140.49~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T6000 21.6.0
Login status: not logged in
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: off
Legacy editor: off
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: on
RECOMMENDATIONS:
none
That is: apparently nothing. But nothing is what I find in the folder where the exported PDF is supposed to be.
OK, I did change the default Vault and created a new one in a Google Drive folder. The folder where I want to export the PDF is under Downloads in my home directory. What would I have to do to test it with the Sandbox vault?
So, I still have not been able to solve this problem. It doesn’t have to do with the document. I have made various tests with very simple notes and none of the is actually exported as PDF even though everything seems to work fine and I get a message saying the document was successfully exported. Any recommendations as to what to do to try to fix this problem?
I have other PDF issues () but using macOS 12.6.2 and Obsidian 1.1.9, I’m able to export.
As rigmarole said, have you tried a different export location (e.g., Desktop)?
Have you tried using the Sandbox Vault (Help>Sandbox Vault) and exporting?
If it works in the sandboxed vault, that points to a problem with a plug in. Try disabling community plug ins, and CSS scripts, and try 1/2 of your plug ins, retest to see if it works or not, then try the other 1.2 of your plug ins and test. in 1 of those halves, it will not work, then you need to try to divide the 1/2 that didn’t work into halves, and eventually, you will find the plug in causing the problem. Good Luck
Thanks BarryPorter13. This doesn’t seem to be the problem, though. I disabled all the plugins and I still cannot get it to export PDFs. What’s strange is that I always get the popup window saying “PDF saved to path-to-directory” as if everthing went fine. But it didn’t.
Any other antivirus or firewall apps that might be blocking? (Unlikely if the Sandbox vault works.)
Also if this wasn’t suggested yet, in Obsidian open the developer tools and console. Check if you see any errors when exporting.
And here are some additional threads to read, and check if they are applicable. These might be completely irrelevant to you, but I am including them just in case:
Yes. Not only did I restart Obsidian but I even restarted the computer. Same problem. I even did what I’ve done when I’ve experienced some other problems with my Mac: deleted all the contents of the cache folder and restarted the computer. The problem continues. Obsidian keeps on telling me the PDF has been successfully exported, the “Show Debug Info” says everything is hunky dory, but the PDFs are nowhere to be found.
Thanks for your help, guys. This is driving me crazy. In response to rigmarole about the Sandbox vault, here’s the thing. This morning I rebooted my computer and tried again to export a PDF. This time I didn’t manage to export the PDF even in the Sandbox vault.
I’ll check now the other suggestions and report back but I thought this piece of information (that it also failed to export in Sandbox vault) could be relevant.
Thanks. I did this. The developer console doesn’t show any activity when I export the PDF. Shouldn’t there be a log of all the activity in the console? It is totally blank.
No, but this is interesting. With previous versions of Obsidian, when I exported to PDF, the PDF was opened with the default PDF viewer (Preview in my case). This is obviously not happening now. I had other PDFs loaded in the viewer so I tried again closing Preview. The problem persists, though.
Actually, my Obsidian vault is indeed in a Google Drive folder. When I installed the new version of Obsidian in this computer. I made that folder the main vault for my documents. I had not thought about this but this might be related to the problem. My memory fails but I think I was able to print PDFs when my vault was in a local folder.
So, two things changed before I started to have this problem: a) that I installed the newest version of Obsidian and b) that I made the vault I had created with my laptop in Google Drive also the vault for the Obsidian installation on my desktop computer. I attributed the problem to the new version but perhaps the location of the vault has something to do with this.
OK. I seem to have managed to solve the problem. I say “seem” because solving one problem has created another one.
Since I suspected that the Google Drive folder where I had the vault was the problem, I tried the following. I saved all the contents of the vault (two subfolders with .md files) and deleted the vault. I then created a new one (in the same Google Drive location but with a different name). I then moved the subfolders with the .md files into that new vault.
Now, I finally can export PDFs!
But now the problem is with my laptop. When I opened Obsidian in my laptop, it had “magically” figured out that the old vault did not exist any more and I could see all the .md files of one of the subfolders in the vault. The path coincided with the new vault I had created on the desktop computer. Alas, the visible contents were only those in the subfolder containing the documents I had been working on with my laptop.
I then tried to ‘Open another vault’ with the intention of making the main vault folder be seen as a vault and then be able to work with the contents of all the subfolders. This is the error message that appeared on my screen:
An error occurred while loading Obsidian. Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, scandir'/Volumes/GoogleDrive/My
Drive/SYNC/OBSIDIAN_VAULTS/.obsidian/plugins'
I should say (because it is perhaps relevant) that the Obsidian version I have in my laptop is an older version (v0.13.33)
I should also say that I installed the latest version in the laptop and when I try to open the new vault containing the two subfolders, I get the popup window showing that error message. This popup window has two buttons (‘Reload app’ and ‘Open another vault’). If I click ‘Reload app’, nothing happens. It stays there. If I Open another vault which is not the one I created in my desktop (for instance the subfolder containing the documents I had been working with), the vault will open in another window (another instance of Obsidian) and I will be able to work with it. The popup window showing the error does not disappear, though. It continues there with a moving bar and showing the error message.
TUTORIALS is the subfolder it can open and it is a subfolder of the new vault I created called OBSIDIAN_VAULTS. This is what I see on the left column when I try to open a new folder. If I click on the last one (the one I want), the error message appears. No problem with the other ones.
I really can’t follow all of this. But I think you are saying you deleted the Vault manually from Finder? And moved a bunch of stuff around manually in Finder?
Obsidian keeps a list of vaults. You can delete the vault from your filesystem. Or you can remove it from the list in Obsidian. Removing it from the list in Obsidian doesn’t delete anything. And deleting it from Finder wouldn’t remove it from that list.
So depending on what you meant, there is no magic there.
And if you were manually deleting portions of a vault and moving things around, maybe you missed some hidden settings folders?
The error specifically says it can’t find /Volumes/GoogleDrive/My Drive/SYNC/OBSIDIAN_VAULTS/.obsidian/plugins
If you manually made a vault, make sure that .obsidian settings exists, of course. But make sure you have also have a “plugins” folder. I don’t think that folder gets created until you install plugins. So if you just copied Markdown files over, and not settings, then Obsidian will have auto-generated .obsidian for you, but maybe not /plugins.
Sorry, this was a long and convoluted message. What I meant by “magically” was that when I installed the new version of Obsidian in the laptop, it opened in one of the subfolders of the new vault, even though I had not assigned it any vault.
The new vault that I had created in my desktop computer contained subfolders with the same names of those contained in the old vault but the name of the vault itself was different, so the path had actually changed. So the Obsidian installation in my laptop recognized one of the subfolders as a vault (although it had a different path now) yet it didn’t manage to recognize the parent folder (defined now as the Obsidian vault in my desktop computer). I don’t know if this makes more sense.
Anyway, the problem seems to be solved now. I restarted my laptop computer and then it loaded all the plugins, recognized the new vault and everthing works.
) but using macOS 12.6.2 and Obsidian 1.1.9, I’m able to export.