I use a Boox Note Air 2 plus to journal and take notes in class during studies. Is there a plugin where if you save a pdf/png file in a spesific folder in your file explorer, it will create a note automatically in Obsidian? Ideally the note would be named the same as the file +get linked to daily note if file name is a date + get tagget with #toreview + and potetially go through OCR (optical character recognition) automatically. Is this possible?
Things I have tried
Just starting to use Obsidian on a daily basis - All suggestions would be appreciated :))
That´s awesome! I can now save a file on my e-ink which syncs with Google Drive, and a new note will automatically be added to Obsidian, and with templater, automatically embed the pdf in the note
This is great for students using android based I-ink devices to make a inbox for all new notes created.
The only problem is that I cannot set a spesific folder to watch, so if I add other PDF (e.g. presentations by lecturer in class), those will also create a note… I am wondering if it would be possible to make it possible to only watch a certain folder? @qawatake
Did you find a way to do this? This would be great for my workflow. Now I often transcribe parts of my NA2+ notes into a meeting note in Obsidian. It would be much easier to have the handwritten note in PDF format attached to my meeting note and stored in a folder with the same name as the meeting note.
Did not find a solution to watch a spesific folder, but the rest works out great I use Google drive and sync the NA2+ to a folder in my vault. In Obsidian I set the Binary File Manager community plugin to watch for PDFs only and use an inbox folder, where all new notes land. You can apply a meeting template too. If you use ![[<%*tR+=title%>.pdf]] in your template, the PDF will display like in the image above :))
I found a way, but still requires to get hands dirty in the cli atm.
Export a single page as png on the books note to the Obsidian Folder (this works well if you have GDrive installed on the boox and have your Obsidian vault in GDrive)
Note: if you’re on a mac and use iCloud it might be a bit more complicated. I created a small script to do the link. Happy to share if there’s interest.
Note2: I didn’t test the workflow above since I’m on mac it’s a bit more involved.
Interesting! Looks super reliable. Is this possible with PDFs too? I use GDrive for vault and export from Boox, so would be nice if you would share your process in more detail My plan was to install Obsidian OCR which will OCR all new content imported (including PDFs) - Haven´t tried it yet though!
This would be a killer workflow and exactly what I need, with the exception that I tried Taskbone and its OCR function is not as good with my native language as it is with English.
What do you refer to when writing about obsidian OCR?
I’m a total newbie and it appears as a link on the message but I can’t click it, don’t know what I’m missing.
It is a community plugin using Tesseract for OCR, but a valid point you made with language… My notes are mostly in norwegian, so it would also apply for me :)) Let me know if you try it out.
Thanks for you reply. I realized that I missed the main point, i.e. what I would like to OCR is my handwriting. Double challenge then! Yet I can’t understand why there are so many apps that do it relatively well (whether it’s on Android or iOS or Boox - up to 3.2 version the recognition was almost flawless, unfortunately they got it worse in 3.3) but apparently no stand alone pc software (which I would be willing to pay a fair amount for)
