Grouping and printing a set of Notes for Studying

Knowledge management
1

Hi!

I’m a student and have been using Obsidian to take notes for a few months. Following the concept of atomic notes, I’ve been periodically reviewing my notes and breaking them down into smaller notes (even though I still keep bigger notes every once in a while).

However, I ran into a problem when trying to study the material: I usually prefer studying on printed paper, since I feel like I grasp the information more than reading on my MacBook (and my eyes also benefit from that). Even though I know I can export a note from Obsidian, since I have a lot of atomic notes, that process would be too long and tedious.

I also know that I can make a MOC with all the links and add a ! before them, but, other than the fact that the exported PDF doesn’t look great, it only works for macro-topics, and if I had to go put a ! in front of all the links in all my files, I would go crazy.

Is there any way to solve this? How do you approach this problem?

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2

I agree that this is a tough obstacle when you use the atomic notes method. I’ve come up against it myself. I don’t have anything perfect, but a few ideas for the MOC route:

  • You can use Notepad++ to automatically add ! before each line (at least I think you can).

  • You can put a “___” after each link in the MOC so that each note prints on a separate page.

  • Why does an MOC only work for macro-topics? You can make the scope of an MOC as broad or narrow as you like.

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3

You can do that in Obsidian with multiple cursors.

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4

You’re right of course! Excellent!

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5

You might want to print the notes from your file system, not from Obsidian. With your mac’s Finder, go into your vault’s folder, select /search all the files to print, and command P. Would that work?

6

Tell me more about the MOC route and how you can export it to PDF?
I’m writing a plugin that will allow me to compile my notes into something longer. It takes all my links, whether it is a transclude ! link or a normal one and replaces the text with the content of that link but it generates a new note to hold it all. But if there is an alternative out there already. I’m interested!

7

That’s a great idea! No alternative as far a I know. OP mentioned putting a ! In front of every note in an MOC. If you could print that, it’d give you a printout of all the notes. Haven’t tested it myself.

8

I thought a MOC was just a note with links in it? If that is the case isn’t is just going to print a file full of [[linked note]] and ![[another note]]
I feel like I’m missing something

9

If you precede all the [[linked notes]] with ! , they will become ![[embeds]].
Can be done very quickly using the multiple cursor feature.
Then export to PDF.

Shouldn’t take more than a minute or two to do even for a large MOC.

10

Ah ok. I tested it. It doesn’t do more than 1 level as well. Ok, but could be handy for printing.

11

I created a plugin for this:

It pulls in nested content too.

It creates a new md file that you can then print or convert to whatever format using whatever plugin or method you like.

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