Large tables slow to render in Live Preview

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1

Hello there, I use live preview a lot which is working great for me most of the time. That being said I have noticed that tables have a difficulty rendering in live preview, especially if they are big.

I don’t think it is a conflicting plugins (although I use dataview and advanced tables).

Objective:
Either find a way to render tables faster/better in preview mode, or is there a useful work-around? I am open to work-arounds as well. If the solution is to render the table in source mode, then that can work but my tables look like this (below).

List of plugin available if necessary for troubleshoot. SIde note: How can I get a list of all active plugins on my Obsidan?

eg of table:

Category Nutrient Daily Intake Sources
Calories 2,500 to 2,800 kcal/day
Macronutrients Protein 68-100 grams/day (0.8-1.2 g/kg) Meat (e.g., chicken, beef, pork), fish (e.g., salmon, tuna), dairy products (e.g., milk, cheese, yogurt), eggs, legumes (e.g., lentils, chickpeas, beans), nuts and seeds (e.g., almonds, peanuts), soy products (e.g., tofu, tempeh), whole grains (e.g., quinoa, barley).
Carbohydrates 280-420 grams/day (50-60% of total calories), focusing on complex carbohydrates Whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, brown rice, oatmeal
2

in source mode you will not see the table rendered
it’s better to use reading mode and pin the tab so any new opening of a tab will not exchange the note holding the table

i even sometimes drag the note holding the long table to the left sidebar so obsidian will keep it fully loaded at all times and again, use reading mode to be able to easily click into links

1 Like
3

I see, thank you for the swift answer.

I learnt that

  1. Pinned notes stay open
  2. Swapping between reading view (for reading the table) and use, I assume, the source view (for editing the table) has better performance.

Once thing my original post did not clearly show is that it is sometimes hard to read/modify tables in source mode (the first image below), while some other tables are easier to read/modify in source view (the second image below).

These are mostly generated either using the Insert table command or from an AI. So a follow up question is; is there specific table markdown table conventions that people follow or a plugin that would help format tables for ease of use in Obsidian?

image
image1106×367 23.2 KB

image
image862×239 14.4 KB

4

well…

  • keep your column contents short and to the point
  • try making tables dynamically with dataview, on demand (there if you are in source mode, tables are not even generated which is good if you are navigating a note to edit other parts)
  • with dataview you can filter for specific properties making the table possibly smaller
  • you can – thru dataview again or even without it – make use of the db folder and projects plugins where you can filter or manipulate table contents further
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5

off-topic – well, not off-topic but this is not to answer OP here…

i recently clipped websites with larger tables (i used the slurp plugin to markdownize the url)

some of these files were as large as 3-4 MBs…

i found that running python scripts to remove certain columns and bulky urls helped to trim the md files by even 90-95 percent

then i also found that re-rendering the static table dynamically with dataviewjs can be used as a workaround for live preview – it seems faster like that…

e.g.:

```dataviewjs
const page = dv.page("Slurped Pages/filename.md");
const content = await dv.io.load(page.file.path);
dv.paragraph(`Source: ${page.file.link}`);
dv.paragraph(content);
```

if yaml content is also printed, this should work to remove it:

```dataviewjs
const page = dv.page("Slurped Pages/filename.md");
const content = await dv.io.load(page.file.path);

function removeYaml(content) {
    const yamlRegex = /^---\n[\s\S]*?\n---\n/;
    return content.replace(yamlRegex, '');
}

const cleanedContent = removeYaml(content);
dv.paragraph(`Source: ${page.file.link}`);
dv.paragraph(cleanedContent);
```

i’m not sharing the python script because i didn’t test it for various cases but it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that it is an option, having scripts written…