What I’m trying to do:
Redact some sensitive details in an Obsidian file when sharing publicly.
What I’ve tried:
The plugin GitHub - curio-heart/obsidian-wyrd: A purple-hued, low-contrast theme for Obsidian is a bit tooooo psychedelic!
Why? Need it to be more formal for legal/medical type notes.
@3dRKCjr4k Not sure this will completely meet your needs, but I just created a plugin to obfuscate text. It does not actually remove the text, instead using CSS styles to change the appearance. Would appreciate any feedback if you decide to give it a try.
Not only is it too psychedelic, but per its README: “CSS does not have the ability to provide real privacy measures for sensitive data.”
You’ll need to do a search-and-replace and/or manual removal to properly redact your documents.
How are you sharing the file? If you’re exporting to PDF you may be able to use a PDF app to redact. Personally I’d feel more comfortable redacting the text before exporting.
Thanks, @CawlinTeffid - It seems the best step is as you suggest. Redacting my LibreOffice notes was my usual method via the PDF.
FYI: I’m using LO less and less and using Obsidian for all…eventually.
@3dRKCjr4k Thank you for the excellent feedback. My use-case is similar to yours, and accordingly, I’ve re-factored the plugin to more securely redact text. Each character in a brick code block is now replaced with an ASCII block character( █).
In addition, I’ve also tested exporting to PDF and the redacted text is displayed the same as in preview mode.
If this is more to your satisfaction, I would appreciate if any testing you are willing to try.
I’ve also updated the README to more accurately reflect the purpose of the plugin.
Thank you @gapmiss for responding…I wasn’t trying to be rude in any way about the plugin.
It would be a nice plugin to use pending your changes.
Please keep me updated.
@3dRKCjr4k I did not sense any rudeness, just honest critique, which I’m grateful for. Like I said, my use-case is almost identical, so it was a worthy task. Happy to help if it works out for you. The changes I’ve made have been pushed to the plugin’s repository and you can download the 3 necessary files there. See the instructions. Looking forward to any feedback.
I’ll give this a try as for my needs I think it will be perfect. Before I was encrypting parts of the text in some notes using the meld encrypt plugin.
But if you just want something more just in case you convert to pdf and share or when you are sharing your screen and might want to redact some stuff I think this is great.
Will give it a try!
I don’t see the plugin in Community Plugins yet so I can’t test it. When you select the redacted text in an exported PDF, copy, and paste into a plain text editor, what happens?
I have not submitted the plugin to the community. It can be downloaded and installed manually or installed via BRAT with the repository as gapmiss/obsidian-blur.
When a note is exported via PDF and the resulting PDF’s text is selected and pasted into a text editor. The redacted text pastes as “block” characters.
I have noticed that some of the blocks paste extra line-breaks. Not sure exactly why, but it appears the block chars effect the pasting from PDF.
Results from the 2nd paragraph in an example PDF (screenshot)
lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ███████████ adipiscing elit. morbi bibendum commodo congue. vivamus efficitur aliquam felis, id viverra eros blandit sit amet. nam feugiat █████ ac sem aliquam, sit amet dictum dui bibendum. sed █████████ █████████ ████ ██ feugiat. cras sed
viverra libero.
███████████
potenti. nulla eu ullamcorper quam, in tempus nulla. quisque accumsan euismod finibus.
OK, cool, so that works like it should.
I think it would be good to explain in the README how brick differs from the others — it’s a pretty notable difference.
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