Link to the exact page of and external pdf file

Is it even possible to make a link to the exact page of and external pdf file? As a phd/academic, I think it would be useful for structuring references

Thanks in advance,

Keep up the good work,

Gabriel

22 Likes

A work around is if you use Zotfile with Zotero and extract the highlights into Zotero. Each highlight links to the pdf at the exact page you made the highlight. Although you’d have to copy the link from each highlight into a markdown link so it would be cumbersome if you have a lot of highlights or pages to link to.

4 Likes

Would love to see this feature working with the pdf reader in Obsidian!
(and for me it could be just the pdf in the vault)

I couldn’t get this working with external PDF-Readers on MacOS and the standard html-link-to-page approach. (They just open the file).

I think this would really add to the “link to pieces of knowledge” idea, rather than writing it down your own. With this feature you can link to specific content of external resources.
An extension of this feature, with the embedding of a pdf page in a .md file, seems interesting too, but for me the option to link to page would be enough.

2 Likes

I think this should be possible, some apps like Zotero already do this to open the item itself and/or the PDF at the right page e.g. zotero://select/items/(item_id).

See

The relevant part is this one

Zotero Select

Zotero allows you to directly link to an item in your local database. If you paste a valid URI starting with zotero://select into your URL bar in Firefox, it will open Zotero to that item. To create such a zotero://select link from an item, download the file “Zotero Select Item.js” from here and then follow steps 1-3 above. A link will look like zotero://select/items/0_USN95MJC and work only with your library

The link above has two translators if you want to generate those links manually. Depending on what OS you’re using you might need to set up the URL after installing Zotero (that was the case for me in Linux).

If you use Zotfile, whenever you extract highlights/annotations from the PDF, the note has links to the specific pages in the PDF. I wrote a little plugin to export those to markdown and save them to my Obsidian vault: GitHub - argenos/zotero-mdnotes: A Zotero plugin to export item metadata and notes as markdown files

3 Likes

In a web browser, the following line can open a PDF file to a specified page number:

filepath/filename.pdf#page=number

I hope this could be integrated into Obsidian’s file link, so I can append #page=10 to an embedded file link to quickly open it on page 10. It would be helpful for making a mark in a quoted book or paper.

I’ve tried this before (open with default app), but it just opens the file and ignores “#page=10”.

13 Likes

I know some people want to scroll thru the PDF viewer instead of clicking the arrows, that’s cool too but for long pdf docs doesn’t solve the major issue which is you start always at page 1 after closing Obsidian. When the PDF has hundreds of pages that hurts. If Obsidian could remember the page were you left that would be awesome too.

Thanks for the awesome job you are doing!

7 Likes

I second this! Being able to have a PDF in one pane while taking notes in another is amazing and has been massively helpful in taking notes, but there is a minor note of frustration every time I accidentally close the PDF pane and have to click through fifty pages to get back to my spot.

3 Likes

will be implemented in 0.10.8

12 Likes

9 posts were split to a new topic: Problem opening Zotero links