Markdown to PDF (Mobile)

Share & showcase
1

I used AI to make a plugin to export notes to real (not fully rasterized) PDF on mobile. It works fine for me. For anyone interested you can check the repo to read the README and download it GitHub - ALE-ARME/markdown-to-pdf-mobile

1 Like
2

This is really cool!

I have recently migrated to Obsidian after decades of use with OneNote where export to PDF was one of the main uses of the mobile app. With OneNote, to get the export PDF feature i did nothing at all. With your plugin, i feel i need to do more but your Readme is a bit cryptic to me.

Can you explain how to get the plugin from your GitHub page to my android device like I’m a 3 year old with no coding experience? And, are you likely to make it a community plugin?

What i’ve tried already: entering “npm install” into a terminal on my linux mint computer. but this returned an error. i feel like it’s the wrong approach, but no sure where else to enter a ‘command’?

Thanks for your efforts putting the plugin together!

3

OK, so for any other noobs playing along, this is what i was able to do:

Go to the GIT page linked. download the main.js and manifest.json files from the ‘releases’ page. paste these into a folder “markdown-to-pdf-mobile-1.0.1“ (or newer version if you have an update), then copy that folder into the plugins folder of whichever vault you want to use it in. now, this is in a hidden folder, so you need to unhide these folders in your file explorer (on linux mint nemo, i just use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+H). The plugins folder is a sub of .obsidian folder.

Then, once you have the files in the right place, open your vault and enable the plugin via the community settings. To use, find the page you want to export, hit the hamburger menu in the bottom right, scroll to the bottom of the context menu and select “PDF settings”.

Follow the prompts and adjust any desired (e.g. i have found the page break very handy to keep things like “ingredients” all on the same page of my recipe exports), then all the way at the bottom a button to “Generate”. bada boom bada bing you have a PDF. It works really great!

Wishlist:

  • An option for a default export path. currently the plugin put the PDF in the same folder as the original note. I CAN see the benefit here (you can see straight away if there was a PDF made already before going to the effort of exporting again), but would still like the option. I guess bases would help find all the exports too, as these exports will be the only pdfs in my vault.
  • An option to include a footnote with date printed. This would assist version control.
  • Support for non-English letters. I have a lot of recipes in Polish, and i have yet to see any of the accented letters render in the print (e.g., ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż) though the file name saves identical to the note name. I haven’t tested any other language (French would be another which may crop up from time to time in my recipes).