Is there a know official/unofficial size limit of a note. I have many small/atomic notes, but now I’m outlining them into a structure, and beginning actual draft writing. Consequently, my outline ‘note’ will become large over time. Probably over a gig just in text.
Has anyone reported problems with big notes.
Secondly, should I be doing this at all? Should I be outlining and drafting in another tool besides Obsidian?
Thoughts?
Sorry I haven’t an actual answer to your question (I think that’s a question for the developers).
Just an idea: if there is such a limit you could split your outline note into chapters and ![[include]] them into one, large master note.
There are plugins which allow to edit such includes in place.
That would be absolutely huge!
I think the bible is under 5MB.
oh, that’s a test i’d like to try to discover… answer tomorrow i hope.
Thank you. Any effort to determine limits would be greatly appreciated. I’m just attempting to determine if at some point you should not be using what is designed to be a note taking tool, even if that tool has outlining capabilities. Instead, there may be a point you should be using a tool designed for actually writing/outlining.
I love the zotero/obsidian integration for the research part of the workflow. But I’m beginning to suspect that there should be an integration from obsidian to an actual writing tool.
Maybe I’m wrong?
I see where you are coming from. There was another thread about the limits of obsidian in the number of notes and size of a vault. I don’t think we can answer this, only the developers can.
However my thought about the gigabyte note is that it would be too unwieldy to use. You could get completely lost in such a file without good outlining and search and filtering tools. I work with gigabyte log files from time to time and this is always the main issue, finding the entry(s) of interest.
I remember the issue some years ago of Microsoft Word not being able to handle really large documents. The solution back then was to use a different tool such as Adobe FrameMaker to handle the files and you would have to break them up into sections/chapters and only combine them into the final printed version. A gigabyte document when printed would be a lot of pages. You don’t usually see large printed books anymore. I suspect most PDF viewers would not be able to cope with such a file either.
For instance, here is volume 1 of the “understanding women” series:
How did you Calculate that you’d need have a single outline in 1 note clocking in at a GB?
I’m genuinely curious about the use case of a note bigger than like 200 bibles 
Scrivener will do this no problem. It will also let you create 1000’s of smaller notes and then see and edit them as one.
Not sure if it will meet your needs, but you might check out the longform plugin
I prefer writing in Obsidian over MS Word but found that +60.000 words / 375 k characters in one ‘note’ is too much. It’s not about the size but when I’m trying to insert for instance a comment ( %% _here I write a comment_ %% ) the editor freezes after typing the first two %%. I think because the editor starts turning all the text after %% into a very large comment until I close with another %%, but since the editor is frozen I can’t do that for several seconds. I haven’t found a workaround for this yet. Anybody else having this problem too? How did you solve it? Splitting the note into smaller chunks or using the longform plugin, may work but is not an option in this case. I need to be able to add comments to a long text too. All advice welcome.
I’ve had some pretty long notes. Every month I download my Facebook content, copy-and-paste it all into a note, and then start going through and deleting what I don’t need to keep and breaking the rest up.
I have had it lock up on me a couple of times, although I’m not sure how much of that is Obsidian itself, and how much of that is my computer’s limitations. We’re talking roughly 120,000 words.
I started breaking them up into posts, group posts, and comments (three “original” notes) and haven’t had any issues since.
So if that gives you any idea…
I do draft a lot of things right in Obsidian, but if you’re expecting it to get that large, I’d probably choose a different program for that.
I think, too, it’s constantly trying to index it for search.