New plugin: Kindle Highlights

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22

Hi, hadynz.

I installed your plugin but can’t get it to work. I don’t know if it’s a bug or if I’m doing something wrong.
I’m trying to upload my myclippings.txt. I select that option and press “Sync Now”. It asks for the location of my file. I select it but then nothing happens. If I press “Sync Now” again, it asks again for my file.
Thanks for your help!!

Edited to add a screenshot:
Screenshot|668x500
I thought the message in the bottom bar that says “Starting sync…” was a signal that the process has begun. But after 30 mins, nothing has changed.

23

The plugin must have crashed. I am working on improving the feedback the plugin gives you as a user so you know what is happening. If you turn on the Obsidian Developer Tools and looks at the console, you should see an error message in the console.

If you send me your My Clippings file, I can try and load it locally on my machine and debug why the plugin is unable to parse it. I recently found an issue that the plugin could not load Chinese My Clippings file, and I had to make it Chinese aware. Your file might have another use case that I haven’t encountered before too.

You can send me your file on [email protected] if you don’t mind sharing your highlights.

24

@hadynz Thank you so much for a much-needed plugin. I’ve used it for 3 weeks and it works great. Again, thank you! :shamrock:

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25

I am not able to sync my clippings into the Obsidian. I am using Clippings file to sync my clippings here. It keeps on asking for file to upload and shows message “starting sync”.
Details of my system-
Obsidian version- v0.12.3
Pluggin version- v0.2.8

26

Hi, Hadynz, thanks for your help. I’ve sent you my MyClippings file. The second time I tried, there was a message that said “Error loading the file”. I think maybe it has to do with the size of the file? Because I tried reducing the number of quotes to only three books and it worked fine.

27

It works quite good!!! Thanks a lot!!

28

I’ve had several requests from users asking for this plugin to work on mobile too.

Does anyone know what is the best way to contact or to speak to someone from the Obsidian development team? The key question that I need to unpack with them is if they provided any options for plugins that have a dependency on electron. Because this plugin works via screen scraping, it spins up a BrowserWindow for login and to load books for scraping.

Any help or direction from other devs or supporters would be appreciated.

1 Like
30

Hello @hadynz

Thank you for a great plugin idea. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to sync my highlights to obsidian. I’m using the local sync option - to upload the MyClippings.txt file. However, each time I select the file, nothing happens. The statusbar just displays “Starting sync”.

I see several other users have experienced the same thing, so could you please look into this bug?

31

This plugin is awesome. One issue I noticed, and this isn’t a problem with the plugin, has to do with the export restrictions. I have notes from a book that show up as blank. I’m assuming this has to do with the export restrictions by Kindle. Any ideas of an easy way to work around this? If I delete highlights from the book itself, will it delete them in the file created or will the sync then pick up the new highlights?

32

Hi, @jazavchar. I was having the same problem as you and I even sent Hady my MyClippings.txt file so that he could help me identify the problem. Two days ago, he wrote me telling me that the latest plugin update (v0.2.13) should work. I’ve just updated my plugin and it worked perfectly, uploading more than 90 books. It took a little time after selecting my file but I could see the popup window changing. So my advise would be to check if you have the latest update and try again.

33

Thanks for your input. Yes, I’ve been using the v0.2.13 version from the start because I just found out about this great plugin idea and was ecstatic. It still doesn’t work, and I definitely have less books than you (it’s also a new kindle for me).

Hopefully Hady sees this and manages to resolve it in the next few updates…

34

I managed to track down my problem: one of the books had the author alias in another set of parenthesis like so: Author Name (Alias). This was throwing the plugin for a loop.

Hopes this helps to make a fix in the next version of the plugin.

35

This was a bug in the plugin. Should be fixed now. Plugin is now able to parse a My Clippings.txt file in any language. Previously it was configured for just 3-4 languages.

36

This is the first I’ve heard of this issue. I don’t quite understand what the problem is and what the solution that you used to make it work.

Are you able to create an issue for this on Github or just describe this in much more detail here?

To fix this issue, I will need to recreate it before fixing it.

37

@hadynz I am new to writing the code that the plug-in uses. Can you show me how and where to indicate the color of the highlight.

{% for highlight in highlights %}
---
{{highlight.text}} — Page: [{{highlight.page}}]({{highlight.appLink}})
{%- if highlight.note %}{{highlight.note}}{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
38

@hadynz cool plugin! Would it be possible to make the note title customisable? I’d like to prepend them with "Highlights from: " :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Keep up the good work!

39

I really appreciate that you made this. I’ve been trying to achieve something that could transcribe my Kindle Highlights automatically for a long time, and I’ve managed to learn enough Nunjucks to style my highlights based upon color and link each one to the location in the Kindle App. Very cool!

One difficulty I’ve ran into is that I’ve been trying to create a parent Nunjucks HTML template that I can extend styles from in order to limit the amount of code in the add-on itself. However it won’t save with any {% extends "parent.html" %} call. I even attempted to put this in JSON format so that it’s interpreted correctly by data.js, but can’t get it to work. I’d love if the plugin allowed for this type of functionality.

40

Maybe a “grab limit” option - by example “synch only your first book” - would be interesting. Often we try different templates/formats for the exportation to Obsidian, and it’s a waste of time & resources to launch the whole sync as @anon27868835 says. Or another idea: creating a button to stop the synch. Thanks for your great work.

41

My solution was to switch to Readwise.io and their “Official Readwise Plugin”. Kindle and other sources sync perfectly, with tags and metadata that I’ve chosen. Much better product.

42

Thank you for this plugin. It is working well for me except for one thing: on some highlights, the text gets truncated. It seems very random when it occurs, and is not related to the length of the highlight. Is there something you know of that is causing this so that I don’t have to go back in and type everything that is missing? Thank you.