Extract text across multiple notes an summarize

[thepeoples]

What I’m trying to do

I am brand new to Obsidian and am more than a little impressed by what people in this community can do. Hoping someone can help point me in the right direction for my problem.

I’m using Obsidian to take notes for my different classes and I want to be able to highlight a particular piece of text in my note and then generate a summary page where all the highlighted text fragments are extracted and then placed in a summary page that I can review. Here is an example of what I’m after:

Note 1

# Notes
Here is some text.  ==This is what I would like to extract.==

---

Note 2

Here is some more text.  ==I would also like to extract this==

---

Summary Page

# Note 1
This is what I would like to extract

# Note 2
I would also like to extract this

Things I have tried

I’ve tried using tags and the dataview plugin, but can only seem to summarize the note names where the tag exists and not the actual text I tagged itself. Does anyone have any thoughts on how I might approach? Thanks very much for the help!

[drosophila]

Could be wrong but I don’t believe this is possible yet. I think the upcoming Datacore plugin will provide a way (See the “Data Input” section).

[ariehen]

Collecting them isn’t an issue, but formatting them how you want might be tricky.

Have a look here:

List all highlights in document(s) — without community plugins

I use highlights and comments to mark parts of draft documents that need attention, and I’ve been wanting a plugin to list them in a sidebar overview where I could click them to go to the text (similar to the highlight/comment functionality in word processors, but hopefully less clunky). The closest community plugin I found was Extract Highlights, which copies a note’s highlights into the clipboard. I’d have to rerun it every time the highlights changed, and it doesn’t link to them, but I could…

[ceciltech]

As with most things in Obsidian there is a plugin for that: GitHub - ryanjamurphy/workbench-obsidian: A plugin to help you collect working materials.

[writtenfool]

Have a look at the Extract Highlights plugin. It’s dated, but fiddle with it and see if it works.

[holroy]

@thepeoples

I’m using Obsidian to take notes for my different classes and I want to be able to highlight a particular piece of text in my note and then generate a summary page where all the highlighted text fragments are extracted and then placed in a summary page that I can review.

Some of the suggestions so far uses plugins which are somewhat dated, and my approach to this subject would be to use a decorated tasks, that is something like:

- [!] This is what I would like to extract.

... in another note ...

- [!] I would also like to extract this

And to extract all those lines, I would use a query like:

```dataview
TASK 
WHERE status = "!"
```

This would produce a list with links back to the origin of the extraction, and its a clean extraction without extra stuff. If you decided note to relate to that issue/extraction/…, or have completed your treatment of it, you simply delete the task.

Using the Minimal theme or some other which supports custom checklists (or decorated tasks) or whatever you call them, the notes would also stand out a little in the original document, which I also find to be a nice side effect:

Custom characters for your own variation of task decorations can be defined using CSS.