Note Comments / Evernote like layout / Note thumbnails Grid View

[darakah]

Hello Everyone,
I have two main questions (any help / insight would be greatly appreciated!!):

1. Note Comments:
By note comments I mean something similar to the commenting feature from Notion (or google docs where they can be showed in the side panel) where a portion of the text is highlighted and when clicked later on shows a comment. I am not looking for multi-person comments, just simple user comments to keep track of things to modify / answer / update and overall ideas that come to mind for later on related to a portion of the text.

Is there already a way to do this using markdown? (I couldn’t find anything that works also tried using CSS/HTML tool-tips but that didn’t work obviously). For now I am keeping a special background color and writing the comments inline however would prefer a cleaner way if possible.

2. Note Thumbnails:
Something similar to Card / Gallery view provided by other applications instead of the minimal / title view in the folder explorer panel of obsidian. It helps jump between notes much faster (especially when their number increases). I tried searching for a plug-in that does this but couldn’t find any and even if a picture is the first thing in the note it does not show even when using expanded content after using the search functionality).

Any idea of how I can get this?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[macedotavares]

I use markdown footnotes. I hope this screenshot helps.

(Editor on the left, Preview on the right)

[darakah]

Dam … I did not think of using it that way …
Thank you for the suggestion! This is much cleaner already, coupling it with highlighting the text in question for each one.

[darakah]

As for the thumbnail / Grid / Snippet view (trying to get a similar organization as that of Notion / Evernote layout), it can be obtained and customized by following these steps:

1. Install the very nice Obsidian plugin Folder Note (https://github.com/xpgo/obsidian-folder-note-plugin)
2. In the Folder note use the code attached below (I am using borderless table here but it can be written differently PS: you need to adjust the styles to your theme / desire)
3. Click on the folder you wanna work in (similar to Evernote notebook) will open the Folder note with whatever design you created. Now pin this note then open a second window in which any link you click from the left panel will be open.

Example Design:

<!--- Grid View of all Related Files -->
<br>
<table style="width:100%; --background-modifier-border: #282828;">
  <tr>
	  <th style="width: 20%;"> <p style="background-color: #333333; border: none; 
		  color: white; font-size: 13px; padding: 0px 0px; text-decoration: none; 
		  display: inline-block; margin: 0px 0px; cursor: pointer; border-radius: 14px;"> 
		  <a href="OBSIDIAN LINK TO NOTE" 
			 style="--text-a: #cccccc; --text-a-hover: white;"> 
			  <img src="LINK TO THUMBNAIL"; 
									  width=200; height=200;> Character 1 </a> </p> </th>
	  
<th style="width: 20%;"> <p style="background-color: #333333; border: none; 
		  color: white; font-size: 13px; padding: 0px 0px; text-decoration: none; 
		  display: inline-block; margin: 0px 0px; cursor: pointer; border-radius: 14px;"> 
		  <a href="OBSIDIAN LINK TO NOTE" 
			 style="--text-a: #cccccc; --text-a-hover: white;"> 
			  <img src="LINK TO THUMBNAIL"; 
									 clip:auto; width=200; height=200;> Character 2 </a> </p> </th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td > </td>
<td> </td>
  </tr>
</table> 

---

Preview:

---

[darakah]

To make this more practical, a script can be written to update this note whenever the folder it is related to in the vault is modified.

1. Get List of all notes in the folder
2. Sort them following a certain parameter (Word count, File Size, Title)
3. Check whether each file has at least 1 image inside, if not use a default empty image as thumbnail
4. Up-date the note to reflect the new folder structure adding links to all the new files

[Klaas]

@darakah: regarding footnotes, I use them a lot too. I prefer the inline footnote because you don’t need to worry about number sequencing, that is done automatically. That is particularly convenient when e.g. you have footnote 1 in paragraph 1 and footnote 2 in paragraph 3.

If you then when to insert a footnote in paragraph 2, those 3 footnotes will be numbered 1, 2, 3.

If you write footnote text yourself at the bottom of the page, then in the example above you will have footnote 1 in para 1, footnote 2 in para 3, and footnote 3 in para 2. In preview the sequencing will be correct, but in a long note you can easily get confused between the Edit mode numbers and the Preview mode numbers. With inline footnotes that problem does not exist.

[darakah]

Yup, I had been using them to comment ever since Mace suggested it above and encountered this exact situation you highlighted (All the notes that I tend to comment in are pretty big with a lot of paragraphs)!

P.S: I submitted a plugin request on the topic, If you have improvement / suggestions to add to it (Note Comments Panel)

[darakah]

Solution:

[Klaas]

@darakah: so what does Licat’s suggestion do? I got a bit lost in the discussion above - sorry.

And how does one use it in practice?

[darakah]

In editor using Licat’s suggestion:

In Preview:

In Preview if i hover over the highlighted area:

[Klaas]

@darakah: thanks for the explanation. My initial reaction was: to keep a comment hidden one could do `. But with this hovering in Preview does not produce that pop-up.

Thanks again.