64 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
64 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
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## Extract PDF text to Markdown
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Allows you to extract the basic textual content of a PDF into a Markdown file. Works well with headings, paragraphs and lists.
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### Demo
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### How to use this plugin
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After you've installed and activated the plugin:
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1. Drag your PDF into Obsidian
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2. Open the PDF within Obsidian
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3. Make sure the pane with your PDF is focused
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4. Click the "PDF to Markdown" button in the sidebar
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5. Edit the generated markdown file to your needs
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### Tips & Tricks for editing the generated markdown file
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I just went ahead and turned a 500 page PDF into markdown and found that it worked better and faster than I expected.
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#### Bulk-removing page footers
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The book I used had the same footer on every page. That means they got copied into the markdown file over and over, too.
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For bulk search-and-replace I use the Atom editor (https://atom.io):
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0. Copy the footer text into your clipboard
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1. Download and install Atom
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2. Open Atom and open the Markdown file inside
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3. Use "Find -> Find in Buffer" and paste the footer text
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4. Use the button "Replace" or "Replace All" to remove footer text
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#### Remove a single space before a new line of text
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Weirdly, sometimes, new lines of text had a space infront of them. Such as:
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` Some text`
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...which resulted in Obisidian treating it as a sub-block of the preceding line.
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To remove the space for those lines, I used a regular expression search-and-replace:
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1. In "Find in current buffer" activate "Regex Search" (The `.*` icon)
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2. Enter `^([ ]|\t)+` into the search field
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4. Use the button "Replace" or "Replace All" to remove the space
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## Known issues
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### First-time use
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If you had a PDF open in Obisidian _before_ you installed and activated the plugin, hitting the button may not work. I've had this issue with other plugins as well. The code just doesn't hook up to already-open files.
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The solution is to simply close the PDF note and re-open it. That will allow the plugin to hook into it.
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### Limited PDF parsing
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Please understand that this is a basic, best-effort tool to get basic text and headings from a PDF. It really just gets the text from a pdf and turns it into Markdown. The plugin doesn't handle anything more complex, like tables, images, annotations etc:
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- Does not turn PDF highlights and annotations into MD highlights
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- Does not retain PDF numbered lists
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- Does not skip text in headers and footers
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