I’ve been using obsidian on ubuntu for over a year now and I never managed to solve the problem that sometimes documents like pdf, or images just wouldn’t preview. I tried the impossible and there was no way to solve it.
Sorry for the bad wording, I’m using deepl because I don’t know much English. But I consider it pertinent to publish it because I searched for more than a year for the solution to this problem and I never found it and I know that many people had the same problem.
I am using the ubuntu version of snap, but I tried all the linux libraries and they all gave me the same preview problem, that’s why I don’t specify which version I am using because in all of them the failure is the same.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Today, by mere serendipity, when I pasted an image in an obsidian page I ran into this problem again that it was not previewed, but it was strange because in the same page if a previous one had been previewed. I tried to avoid one character (the tilde (') ) and the image worked perfectly.
English words do not have the tilde that is so common in Spanish and that is why it is a rare problem.
I decided to check where I had PDF to see if the error was solved in the same way.
I have a folder called “BÉCQUER” where I have the poems of this Spanish author. It turns out that the name of the pdfs did not have this tilde and it still did not work, I got discouraged, but I decided to change the name of the folder to “BECQUER” without the tilde and UALA, all the pdfs in the folder could be previewed.
In summary, obsidian in linux, at least in ubuntu, does not allow to visualize multimedia that contains in its name some tilde (e.g. solución change by solucion), or in the name of the folder that contains it some tilde.
It doesn’t seem to be something difficult to solve and I know that many people had that problem and couldn’t fix it either. So I leave it for you to take it into account in future bug fixes.