Options to change default behaviour for links

Hi. I have a few suggestions for changing the default behaviour for links, particularly with regard to PDFs.

(1) Allow the user to change the default PDF app.

By default the Obsidian PDF reader is opened. This is great for glancing at documents, but does not allow searching / highlighting (or, at least, I haven’t found a way to do that). There is a drop down option to use the system reader, but it would be convenient if there were an option to set the default PDF app to speed up workflow.

(2) Allow forward and back when opening PDFs in Obsidian App.

Once a link is used to open a PDF in Obsidian one cannot use shortcut keys to go back to the previous note.

(3) Prevent documents imported by drag and drop from being automatically embedded.

The default behaviour is automatically embed files which are added to Obsidian via drag and drop (in edit mode, this is achieved via the exclamation mark, e.g. ![[name_of_file]]. When importing PDFs via drag-and-drop, I would like to override this behaviour. This is because PDFs take over much of the screen, and there is already a great way to quickly glance at PDFs via hover. However, when importing images via drag-and-drop, I most likely want them to be embedded. It would be great if different embedding options could be set for different file types.

These are merely suggestions to speed up workflow, and I hope that it doesn’t look as if I’m obsessing over minor detail!

1 Like

Brand new to Obsidian—just downloaded it today and am on my third note. So far so good, but I noticed this right away. I included a link to a PDF with ![[]], and it overwhelmed my note with the previewer.

I would rather just have a link to the file that would open in Preview when clicked.

I found a solution here: How to link a local file in Obsidian? - #2 by chiuchiu

The syntax [filename](file:///<absolute-path>) allowed me to link to a PDF on my local filesystem. Clicking on that in preview mode opens the file in Apple Preview.

For example,

[MyFile.pdf](file:///Users/myusername/Documents/literature/MyFile.pdf)

+1 for option to switch open in system viewer by default