Just came on the forum to check on some latest things and saw this post on top.
Another coincidence today!
Because, I have started to work on such a plugin few weeks back now. It has progressed quite well, and now I feel much interested in developing it than I was before starting to develop it. And now it really makes sense to ask : “Why there was no such plugin to compose books inside Obsidian?”
Like, Obsidian is a great tool to keep dumping your content and then using various methods and plugins, shape the content into an organized document. The original idea with which the plugin started was to simply view the hierarchy of the notes as a continuous document (proposed to me by an Obsidian user). To go through the notes in a convenient way, with a continuous infinite view.
But, then i realized it can be actually used to compose books and documents quickly through live previews and quick updating the documents. And since its based on folder hierarchy, moving sections, chapters and swapping content will be very easy, as they are all notes.
At present, a lot of optimizations mechanism has been applied to render even 10K notes at once inside a continuous view or paginated view. But look wise a lot of things need to be taken care of.
I also write research papers, so had the idea of using Obsidian as a Latex editor. But Latex is a huge took in itself, so to achieve that level of features, there is a long way to go for this plugin. But, I think, if we could able to achieve it, writing research papers and similar documents will be so much easier compared to learning latex.
For exporting to PDF, Pandoc will be really helpful. The idea will be to make the exported book look the same as it’s looking in the preview in this plugin while developing it. So a lot of things are pending in the preview styling right now to work on.
Thank you for your research, that was really helpful for me to learn few things. You have also mentioned many points which I already had in mind on how this plugin will going to work. Glad to meet similar mind here.
Well! Whenever you will get time, you can join in the to contribute in testing, suggesting improvements and sharing ideas to help this plugin achieve its true vision.
The plugin has been submitted for review to be published in community plugins.
The plugin is called Book Simulator