I am pasting documents that I have highlighted in Microsoft Word into Obsidian and wondering if there is a way to keep the highlights wen I paste the documents. I want to start working in Obsidian rather than Word for research but it is a shame to lose all those highlights.
I have a similar concern… I have lots of highlighted and color coded bolding which I would like to import into Obsidian (and comments) … how can one do this (simple copy paste produced a jpg, or plain text options) ?
The best way to do this is probably to convert your Word documents to markdown using Pandoc.
This Pandoc command will convert Word highlights into markdown highlights:
pandoc input-file.docx --to markdown+mark -o markdown-output.md
input-file.docx and markdown-output.md are placeholders that you need the replace with the correct / desired paths. If you are working current directory, the filename will suffice, but otherwise, you need the full paths to the existing input file and the desired output path.
Note the +mark extension for the markdown format. This is what ensures, that the Word highlights are formatted like so: ==highlight== in the markdown file.
For comments, I think you would need a lua filter for Pandoc like this one that can convert Word comments / changes to CriticMarkup in markdown: A pandoc filter for MS Word track changes to criticmarkup · GitHub
Use it like so along with the --track-changes option.
pandoc your_word_doc.docx --track-changes=all -to markdown+mark --lua-filter=criticmarkup.lua -o markdown-output.md
See also the Commentator / CriticMarkup plugin for Obsidian:
awesome thanks Ill try Pandoc
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