I would very much like this as well. I tried to integrate Zotero in my use case, but in the end it was more hassle than what I would like. I have a solution in place to sync my obsidian-related files all in one place, with no size restrictions, and I include my digital library in it as well. It works. I’m already able to point a link exactly to a single place inside a pdf, now I only need a way to annotate it directly.
1 Like
I find surprising that the value of this is not immediately obvious to everyone in the project. Every single person that uses Obsidian to study would benefit from core pdf annotations. Reading and interacting with pdfs composes at least 80% of the study time of everyone learning or doing science, mathematics and related fields.
5 Likes
PDF++ plugin
I’m actually quite surprised that this issues hasn’t been resolved by the Obsidian team, considering Obsidian has been out for a few years now. This is a very big hole in Obsidian, along with handwriting, and it really needs to be filled if Obsidian is going to be taken seriously as a proper note-taking app, in my opinion. Using another app for reading PDFs results in context-switching, which is definitely not good for sustained, deep work because it causes a temporary restart and thus requires a brief build-up period to get back on track. Hopefully this request will not be lost in the void, as it’s such a basic requirement for doing any type of research.
4 Likes
I further support the idea of a core feature of Obsidian that let us highlight and annotate pdf. Moreover, there’s already a great plugin called PDF++ that not only does that but also other cool things, but its own creator says that there’s high risk it won’t work in new Obsidian updates (see ush’s post in [Feature Request] Make Builtin PDF Annotations - Feature archive - Obsidian Forum); that thing stopped me from even trying this new plugin, since it would be frustrating to learn to use a thing that in few months/weeks could stop to work. I’d suggest Obsidian developers to take this great plugin and make it a core plugin of Obsidian: i’m sure even its creator @ush would be happy with that, considering all his effort would not get useless.
@matar3 I’d say PDF++ can be considered to be more future-proof than other PDF plugins that store annotations as JSON code blocks with their own data structure (Annotator, Markmind, …), though. (details: Plugin Fragility? · RyotaUshio/obsidian-pdf-plus · Discussion #48 · GitHub)
But yeah, I agree it would be great if Obsidian could provide the functionalities natively or at least provide a stable public API for the PDF-related features in the future.
2 Likes