I have been learning Framemaker recently to use in a book project I am working on.
The learning curve is steeper than Markdown because you need to define all of the terminology. In other words, XML is completely “non-semantic” and you need to define what syntax you want for each effect.
But the result is:
(1) Complete flexibility and ability to customize it to function as you wish
(2) Very easy to share your “semantic definitions” with others - so there is never a problem of incompatibility between versions and you have full ability to move the document to another editor/viewer in the future.
I know it will not happen, but I do wish XML had taken off in recent times rather than Markdown.
I’ve been on a bit of a spirit quest with this stuff. We’ll be covering it at length with this weekend’s episode. Of course I explained how Obsidian doesn’t do block references and two hours after we stopped the recording, Obsidian added block references.
I woke up one morning to seeing Nick Milo’s video on block references and said, “WHAT THE!” I seriously didn’t expect it, but they did it. Silver and Licat (Obsidian devs) sure move fast.
The fact that they do all this with plain text files in the file system just blows me away. It’s a testament to their talent, as well as the macOS file system.
I guess with the prevalence of SSDs now, it’s like files are stored in “slow memory.”
Damn, read this too early today now I feel like a 5Y old on Xmas eve having to wait until Sunday afternoon.
This IMHO is the most exciting area in apps currently.
Besides watching the excitement of these tech innovators you have the big Elephant that took a long stop at the watering hole now stampeding into the race trying to catch up to the cheetahs.
@MacSparky this area is moving faster than even your scheduled podcast publican schedule but I think everyone is enjoying the quest and will appreciate any insights that MPU will discover.
From what I’ve seen of the Big Elephant’s recent v10 release, I think the Elephant got its compass broken and ran back to the old, dry waterhole. They will never catch up with the new note making methods and supporting technologies.
@D_Rehak I agree about getting excited about this stuff. Right now I am finding DEVONthink + Obsidian to be pretty powerful. It is crazy how fast everything is iterating.
jumping in here since @justindirose asked what questions we have and since you were on Roam for a while…how best to prep our Roam database for export to Obsidian? Migrating has left me with a very messy vault, with paragraphs that show up in red font (code blocks?), folders that I didn’t want from having naming conventions such as Topic/sub-topic, etc… or perhaps there’s a keyboard maestro script in there to clean it all up? (paging @macsparky and @ryanjamurphy)
I should probably ask this in the obsidian forum come to think of it…
I brought over a very limited amount of data. I just wanted the experience of working in Obsidian. Pasting Markdown in OB though is a great jumping off point. Also I really like their template system.
Ta! Perhaps it’s not either Obsidian’s or Roam’s fault by my very own for having a messy Roam in the first place…
so far I have isolated a few issues (for posterity’s sake):
Indentation: if you have a lot of indented blocks (think 1.1.2.1), you will either want to unindent them in Roam and then replicate the indentation in OB or just be happy without indentation (or find some clever way to translate multilevel indentation to OB markdown. Anyone know this, let me know, pretty please!) Note: just had a look, and some notes are absolutely fine, while others are not, go figure)
file/note names: if you have a lot of notes with names such as “topic/sub-topic” you will want to rename them to something like “topic-subtopic” as other wise you will have a folder called “topic” and within it a file/note called “sub-topic” (unfortunate if you have things like “course1/week1” “course2/week1”)
block embeds: tricky, and don’t work without some manipulation. I haven’t found a solution, my guess is to do a query on ‘embed’ and then change all block embeds to ‘replace with text’ or ‘text with alias’, which would at least give you a way to find the page it originally came from to re-create the embed. perhaps mark as quote?
tags: replace with [[ ]] via markdown importer or leave as tags, and just use the files that Roam created (belt and suspenders, potentially very messy…)
attributes: no idea. I’m thinking it could be helpful to turn these into pages via double-bracketing them, so that you could find, via the backlink pane, all ‘author’ notes (for example). I have not tested this, any help appreciated.
italicised page names: I have a lot of those for film/book/etc titles. they don’t work. unitalicise before export and try not to feel too bad for using the wrong formatting
fuzzy date creation via Roam42: again, no idea - anyone?
templates via Roam42: use the builtin templates function of Obsidian! yay!
iOS integration: that’s a whole other conversation…
if anyone has solutions or further migration issues please let me know. I’m currently just using a testing vault but would love to migrate permanently.
NB: I will post this same in the obsidian forum as it seems like that’s where it actually belongs - apologies for cross-posting!
