Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by monkmartinez on Thursday October 13, 2022 @02:35PM (#33194735)

There is very little criticism of Obsidian here, but you definitely pointed a few out. I am a OneNote user and Obsidian doesn't really compare to OneNote. If you read a lot of papers, you can have OneNote OCR the text and make it searchable.

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Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by coffeeling on Thursday October 13, 2022 @07:01PM (#33197597)

OneNote's PDF support isn't really for PDFs, though. It just literally prints the PDF as images onto a OneNote page and OCRs it. Makes for a really heavy page and none of the normal PDF amenities like doing highlighting within the file itself.

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Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by InitialLastName on Thursday October 13, 2022 @11:51PM (#33199445)

It's strange how inconsistent Microsoft's PDF support is... Edge is essentially the best-in-class PDF markup app on Windows, but OneNote PDF support is soul-crushingly rudimentary.

I guess expecting consistency from the org with 3+ mutually incompatible video call apps and 5 volume control panels was always a fool's errand, though.

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Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by wiennat on Friday October 14, 2022 @12:24AM (#33199608)

I guess it is because Edge is using the one that comes with Chrome while OneNote has its own implementation.

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Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by juki on Friday October 14, 2022 @02:50AM (#33200360)

> I guess it is because Edge is using the one that comes with Chrome

Is it? As far as I can tell, Chrome just has a plain PDF viewer with none of the annotation/highlighting/commenting/read-aloud features that Edge has.

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Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by InitialLastName on Friday October 14, 2022 @08:41AM (#33202754)

No, the Edge PDF viewer has a much larger feature set than the Chrome viewer (although, I think sometimes for reasons I can't place PDFs opened with Edge do end up using the Chrome viewer instead of the Edge native viewer).

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Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by lenkite on Friday October 14, 2022 @12:47PM (#33205945)

I missed Old Edge EPub reader. It was the best.

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Re:Show HN: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app by jamesholden on Thursday October 27, 2022 @11:06AM (#33358663)

So, there is this tool: <https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf> OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched or copy pasted.

This mentions cross-platform usage and seems simple. Is there some way to use this with Obsidian through a plugin? If so, please create a GitHub project and send us a link! :D

Just for reference, I found it with a list of a ton of other tools: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/301318/how-to-ocr-a...

I have messed around with Tesseract a bit, and at some point, I was able to turn a PDF into a text file. I was thinking of doing that and having them as markdown files which are tiny compared to the original. Then keep the Original elsewhere. I've been playing with another PDF system I'm not willing to give up on. :D

Point is, I think I can bring more dimension to my Obsidian or Markdown library by having 'txt' copies of pdfs. The search and tagging alone would be so handy.

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