Extract Highlights Plugin

[den]

Yes you are right.
After rethinking it there are 2 big user scenarios. The suggestion can be as interesting option to utilize powerfull linking capability of Obsidian.

[den]

Not sure, but I think where you put the end reference that is the end of block reference. It doesn’t need to be after the dot.

[Finessest]

Since MarkDownload also imports formats in bold and italics, these are now also considered highlights in my source file, but actually, they are not.

Will there be a possibility soon to choose in the settings in which markdown formats should be taken as highlights?

[Jotapa]

Hi akaalias,
thank you for developing this Plugin. I find it very useful to read and extract insights from research papers.

Quick request for you:

Just saw your new release that extracts text marked with ** . That might be useful for some people but it’s a total nightmare for me (and maybe others).

I don’t want to accept every ** already included on a document. The highlights should be the ones I select (currently using ==).

Can you please add parameters to settings with the Highlight options we want to use?

• [x] ==
• [ ] **
• [ ] mark

We would be able to pick the ones that make sense for each of us. I can’t use the Plugin until I have that option available. The documents are full of ** highlights that mean nothing to me.

Hope it’s reasonable a possible for you. It would be great.

Thanks!

[akaalias]

Awesome, thank you and @Jotapa for the quick feedback! I’ll see to making it optional today so you can continue working as before. Thank you for your patience

[akaalias]

Hi @Jotapa and @Finessest - I just implemented the option to use bold for highlights.

This setting is off by default, to enable bold for highlights please use the toggle.

Use the plugin settings tab to fetch the latest version (0.0.9)

When I have more time (I’m slammed with work this week) I’ll look to making it more individualized ("==" or “**” or “mark”)

But for right now this should unblock you for the time being while allowing @Klaas to use bold for his flow.

Let me know what you think!

[akaalias]

@icebear

Edit: I guess in step 5, it may be useful for the extrator to add a [[Self referential link to origin note]] at the top of the bullets in the clipboard - recognizing that I paste these into a “Seeds” or other note for further use. This would save the step of me doing so myself.

Hi @icebear, I appreciate your answering my questions. Thanks so much!

I did add two configuration-options to add a Self-referential link to the origin note:

1. You can add $NOTE_TITLE in the heading (which probably isn’t useful for you since you don’t need the extra heading)
2. You can optionally enable footnotes for each highlight with a single back-link to the source-file at the bottom of the highlights.

Does either help?

[Klaas]

@akaalias: thank you setting bold for me. Thanks for a useful plug-in.

[Finessest]

awesome, many thanks. that was quick.

[Jotapa]

Absolutely awesome!

Thank you for offering this to the Obsidian Community. I’m 100% into using all the features.

I can now read a note on my iPad using iA Writer. Highlight text using its shortcut key. Wait a few seconds for the Sync to happen through iCloud and then extract all the highlights on Obsidian and use it as my draft summarised content to learn what I need. Absolutely fluid and streamlined. Simply great!

The Header and Footnotes generation are great too. Looking forward to using the Output to a new note… using the Note Refactor Plugin for now but will gladly handle everything here.

[akaalias]

YESSSSSS! I’m so happy to hear that. Thanks!

[akaalias]

Hey all, I’ve added three new features that I’ve wanted for a while:

1. “Highlight sentence under cursor” - Hotkey

Adding highlights without using my mouse. It’s a hotkey (Alt+Shift+_) that will surround the current sentence with “==”.

Hotkey Demo

2. “Creating ad-hoc MOCs from highlights” – Setting

• A new optional setting that turns each highlight in your list automatically into a link to a note. Off by default.

Use this to create ad-hoc maps of content (MOC) during your research.

Demo

Settings

3. “Auto-capitalize first letter” – Setting

I’ve found it annoying that my highlights would have these lowercase first-letters in the list. Just looked wonky, especially in combination with the ad-hoc MOC creation via links.

Before:

After:

[jeffk8900]

I am having trouble getting the plug-in to work. My keyboard shortcut for the SHIFT + ALT + - is assigned to the long hyphen. I can’t find that on my system and if I try to assign hotkey to something different for the plugin in obsidian it doesn’t seem to work. Any thoughts?

[icebear]

I reset my hotkeys to Ctrl-Q to make and highlight and Alt-Q to extract it.

[jeffk8900]

Thinks for the tip, but not working for me. I probably have something weird set-up I can’t track down.

[akaalias]

Hi @jeffk8900 - Thank you for raising the issue. If you’ve set a custom hot-key combo and it’s still not working, can you take a screenshot of the javascript console (View -> Toggle Dev Tools) while trying to highlight? Just to see if there are any obvious errors happening.

[jeffk8900]

Thanks for the reply. I don’t see anything coming up in the console. I am getting weird behaviors. If I have two notes open and try to highlight in one note with the custom keyboard shortcut I assigned to the plugin sometimes it highlights a header in the other note. Also, it doesn’t toggle. It just keeps adding the highlight markdown syntax. I have un-installed and re-installed, shut down Obsidian and re-opened. I just tried again and I could get the toggle to work, but move to the note in pane next to it to highlight something different, it still toggles the highlight on the other note. I got something messed up I assume.

[gmf1111]

Having issues here as well using Obsidian version 0.10. I first noticed that if I have two notes open in vertical split screen, using the highlight hotkey would highlight the first word on the note page.

Thinking that having multiple windows open was the issue, I closed all windows down, then tried highlighting, nothing happens in this case. If I close all windows except the note I am working on, the highlight function would only work if I restart Obsidian.

So looks like for now, this will only work for me if I leave only one window open, restart Obsidian and make sure I do not touch split screen. Just wanted to share my experience so far. Thanks for working on this in general. Love the idea!

[akaalias]

Hi @gmf1111 and @jeffk8900 - I reproduced the issue today and just released a fix for it. After you update the plugin, please test and let me know if it works for you as well. Thanks!

[gmf1111]

Seems like it works great now. Thanks for the fast response and fix!