Two new novel-writing plugins

[Spooker]

I made a couple of plugins for novel-writing. Previously, I used Word and Scrivener, and while Obsidian doesn’t have all the writing-oriented features (yet), the extensibility means I can bring the experience I want. So here they are (they’re both published to the community plugins so look for them there):

Plugin 1: Headings in Explorer

This one is what it says on the box.

This one is from Word. I got tired of having looking on the left side for files and the right side for headings in the file, so I combined the two in one. This is especially useful when I have multiple scenes (heading) in each file (chapter).

You can click on the headings to navigate to the file, and if you’re somewhere in a file, you can click on this nifty, new target button that directly brings you to the exact file+heading your cursor is on.

And of course, there’s a command you can toggle it on/off on a hotkey.

Plugin 2: Dialogue Mode

This one is a feature in Scrivener and some other writing apps. It highlights dialogue on the page (dims the rest of the words).

Not super fancy, but useful when editing. Supports both light/dark mode. Recommend using it with a smart quotes plugin because it sometimes fails to properly escape straight quotation marks.

Future work

I’m working on a larger plugin to build good-looking, publishable books from Markdown, both ebooks and print, focusing on an easy-to-use author experience. Ebooks are relatively easy (especially reflowables), but print is a jumble of complexity: gutters, trim, bleed, resizing, left vs right pages… all the way to drop caps, and it all still needs to look nice.

Surprisingly, there aren’t a lot of tools like this, and the industry standard is $250 on the market and only on Mac. This will be free.

Here’s a sneak peek at the chapter/scene export management interface:

[jimclay75051]

I will check these out. They sound very useful.

[jimclay75051]

I think both plugins are good. On the Dialogue plugin instead fadding the non-dialoge text would it be possible to give the Dialogue a color. The plugin seems to be fadding the text in all the notes, not just the ones with dialogue in it. But the plugin is useful. It pops out how much, or little, dialogue there is.

The explorer plugin might work. The problem with it right now is that it is not collapsable. I have some files with dozens and dozens of headers and they dominate the file explorer, making it hard to find the folders and files. So if if the headers could be collapsed when not needed it would provide a much cleaner and useable look.

They are both very good plugins and they worked very fast with no apparent bugs.

[Spooker]

Hey, thanks for the feedback.

For the Dialogue Mode, I can add dialogue color (and perhaps background highlight as well) in quickly as an option.

For the Headings+Explorer plugin, I added a command to enable/disable the heading feature called “Toggle File Explorer Headings” due to a similar request, and you can set a hotkey for that in your hotkey settings menu. Hopefully that addresses your feature ask, but if not, I could provide a more prominent UI toggle if that’s what you’re looking for?