iA Writer on iOS to Obsidian Workflow

[renerodriguez]

Any recommendations on using iA Writer for research notes on my iPhone, then ingesting those notes seamlessly with Obsidian?

[ryanjamurphy]

If you sync your Vault with a cloud service provider and make sure iA Writer’s default file format is .md, your notes can be opened and synced seamlessly in both apps.

That said, the iOS app 1Writer has support for wiki links and is therefore a better option than iA Writer for Obsidian compatibility.

[renerodriguez]

@ryanjamurphy I appreciate your quick feedback and suggestions. I’ll buy 1Writer again (I used to use but didn’t get the whole “mark-up” thing until recently. LOL. So, I switched to iAWriter, which I still love, because of the GUI (at the time, it was much nicer than 1Writer).

Many thanks!

[renerodriguez]

@ryanjamurphy sorry for the silly questions, but can’t figure out how to sync my Obsidian files with Dropbox. Do I need to move my Obsidian folder containing my vault to my Dropbox folder, or is there another way I’m not seeing?

I purchased 1Writer per your suggestion and have that syncing with Dropbox on my iPhone.

[Luhmann]

Yes, you can just move your vault location to Dropbox and set 1Writer to use the same vault. One issue to be aware of however is that 1Writer doesn’t handle subfolders as well as Obsidian, so I would recommend using a flat file structure.

[renerodriguez]

Thank you, @Luhmann. Much appreciated.

[dregar]

I’m having problem with 1Writer recognizing the tags written in Obsidian. They would show up as heading in 1Writer. Do you know why?

[ryanjamurphy]

I do not, offhand. Mind posting a demo screenshot?

[dregar]

Here’s the comparison. Appreciate in advance.

[bdillahu]

It would appear that at least partially it’s using the “#” for the first #tag as the “closing #” for the title line - some Markdown uses a open and close headline marker I think.

Not that it fixes anything

[ryanjamurphy]

Yeah, that’s odd. Does the same thing happen if the line isn’t immediately following a header?

I would probably create a comment line or something. Use commenting syntax at the start of the line to tell 1Writer not to look for a header #. E.g.,
// #tag

Not perfect, but it should work.

[cjaguilera]

Hi! Thanks for all the comments, they are all very useful. I have one question, when I see my obsidian files in 1Writer I’m not able to see the images embedded…any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!

[ryanjamurphy]

What’s the format of the image syntax? Obsidian supports two kinds of image links: ![[image.jpg]], similar to how other embeds are done in Obsidian, and ![description of image](image.jpg), the conventional markdown syntax. The latter will work in iA Writer (providing the image path is correct, the file is available, etc.). The former will not.

[silop]

This is very annoying. Since 1Writer doesn’t handle subfolders well, the image file has to be in the same location as the markdown file to show up in the 1Writer preview. Same applies for[[wikilinks]]. 1Writer can only jump to links, if linked files are contained in the same folder. Additionally, 1Writer do not recognize #word as a tag for files added through External Folder Provider. I will submit a suggestion to its developer.

[ryanjamurphy]

You can use Obsidian’s preferences to set wikilinks to be generated using Relative or Absolute paths. Relative links worked well for note linking in my experience. I rarely use images so I can’t comment on that!