#1

Hi all, I need to organise a series of emails on a timeline and I’m looking for ideas on how to do it.

All the emails are pasted on long PDFs, sometimes I have the entire thread pasted there, or single emails. On occasion they contain attachments.

I’d like to create some sort of timeline, so I can also connect events that have happened on the same day, for example.

At this point I have no idea how to approach it so any suggestion or even minor points to consider would be helpful!

#2

A simple start would be to make a chronological list of links to the files. It could be expanded with short summaries of them.

There is at least one community plugin for making timelines. Might be worth a look (I’ve never used it).

#3

thanks for the suggestion. Do you know if it is possible to point to specific parts of the file, though? (I don’t think it’s currently possible).

The reason I ask, is I have these big PDF documents which contain lots of different email threads, each one with different dates and/or people involved. Pointing to the file would not be useful without the ability to point to a specific part of that file.

#4

Probably not, but check the community plugins. I vaguely remember seeing something recently that claimed to be able to do that (but I might be misremembering, or it might have been something outside of Obsidian).

You could also research options for extracting those emails from the PDFs so you could store them in a more flexible format.

As a workaround, you could write the page number of each email you want to link to. Then instead of clicking a link, the flow would be to click the link, write the page number in the page number box, and press Return (or scroll if Obsidian’s PDF viewer doesn’t have a page-number box). It’s slower, buy maybe acceptable.

#5

To my surprise, you can link to specific pages in a PDF.