Hi everyone!
I’ve just released Vault Passport, a plugin that solves a problem I kept running into: the moment you try to share an Obsidian document with someone who doesn’t have your vault, all your [[wiki-links]] become meaningless noise.
What it does
Vault Passport exports any Obsidian document via pandoc to a polished, self-contained PDF. Every [[linked note]] in the vault is resolved into a proper [@citation], a BibTeX bibliography is generated on the fly, and Pandoc produces the final PDF with a real reference list — no vault required on the reader’s end.
Here is an example of a result with the included “Eisvogel” export template:
Key features
- All Obsidian link types handled:
[[Note]],[[Note#Heading]],[[Note#^block-id]],![[embed]], images, sidecar notes for PDFs - Eisvogel template built in — professional cover pages, running headers, syntax-highlighted code
- Callout conversion:
> [!NOTE]blocks become styled LaTeX boxes - Table of contents, custom template variables, all configurable from the settings tab
The Docker design decision — I want your feedback
PDF generation runs inside the pandoc/extra Docker container. This means you need Docker installed, but you get Pandoc, XeLaTeX, and Eisvogel out of the box without any separate installation steps.
I chose Docker to avoid the “it works on my machine” problem — TeX distributions are notoriously finicky to install. But I’m aware this is an unusual dependency for an Obsidian plugin and may be a barrier for some users.
If you have thoughts on this approach please let me know in the comments. Based on community feedback I’ll decide whether to add a local-pandoc fallback path.
Installation
You can install the Plugin via the community plugin manager
GitHub
github.com/one-wheeled-driver/obsidian-passport
Bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests very welcome
Disclaimer
Is this project open source? Yes
Is this project completely free? Yes
Is this project vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No