@OogieM Thank you! May I ask a favor? You are more technically proficient than I. Would you mind sharing a few (redacted if appropriate) screenshots showing how you have this setup? I’m thrilled to read your reply (and others on this thread) as it give me hope that this can be done without too much fiddling.
Ulysses is ok. I mainly use it because it is markdown and I can manually rearrange the sheets. Apart from latter feature, I would prefer to use something else. Scrivener is powerful but is “updated” at a snails pace, if at all and I dislike using DropBox sync.
For my use case, this doesn’t bother me too much. As long as I can get the near final manuscript into Word, I will finalize the formatting in Word before sending to the editor or publisher.
That’s fair, and I can see your point. I’m producing several documents a week at times in Ulysses and it handles all the formatting for me. (I just added a new style for printing 2 pages per sheet with a correspondingly bigger font).
For my use case, I think I’ll suck up the Ulysses subscription and count it as buying me time!
Thanks! I’ll definitely check this out. I hate to ask such a stupid question but humility is a virtue so here goes; I can’t ever figure out how to download and install a file from GitHub. I don’t have a GitHub account, is that the issue or am I just not seeing what I need to do to install plugins on GitHub to Obsidian?
Inside of Obsidian, you can find all the plugins that have gone through the developers. You find it under community plugins and then you search for Longform.
Besides transclusion, you can also rearrange headers in the outline with drag and drop.
You want to look for “Releases” in the right column on GitHub. This takes you to the compiled files for a project. As GitHub focuses on the source code, the main column lists the source files, which is not what you want to download unless you intend to contribute (make changes) to the code and/or you intend to compile it yourself.
As you can see, the “Latest” release is listed under “Releases”. Clicking in that will take you to a list of files available for the most recent release. In this case, it will list the three files mentioned in the Readme ( main.js , manifest.json , and styles.css) along with zip and tar.gz files which presumably each contain the same three files (perhaps plus more; docs, readme, etc). If you want some release other than the latest, then click on either the “Releases” header or the +n releases link (where n is the number of releases minus 1) to be taken to a list of releases.
As a aside, not all projects make use of GitHub’s “releases” feature. So if the “Releases” item is missing, then you may need to find a link on the homepage of the project to some other location to download a compiled release of the project.
As @Kullenej said, you can install it from Obsidian by searching for it in the Community Plugins.
You can also install it manually based on @waylan’s instructions, but I wouldn’t recommend it: it’s harder to keep updated that way. It is useful if you are concerned about the safety of the code, though, and want to ensure you know what the plugin is doing under the hood.
If you think you will be done in 1-2 years for your book it’s just worth the subscription. You can concentrate on getting the book out than fiddling with the tool. A happy writing platform with less friction goes along way. If it were me I would just stick with Ulysses and reconsider later in future if I still need once the book is out.
Note that the first page of the transcluded note is shown with a scrollbar to read the rest of it. Then the second transcluded note is below. There is a far rihght side scrollbar to move through the entire source document “Entertainment”
Yes to PDF I print out my TV and Movie lists and have them over in the living room by the remotes.
I think yes to docx using the Pandoc plugin but I’ve not tried that. I understand that it can be cumbersome to get set up but works well ocne you figure it all out. but no personal experience
As to adding plug-ins. I always us ethe search in community plugin-s in Obsidian nad only go to the GitHub code if I want to look at the source, verify something or think I may fork it and make some changes for just me. Not something a normal user would normally do though.
Though perhaps the least of your issues, it’s trivial in Word to make endnotes footnotes and vice versa. Select all, right click, convert to chosen format.
After reading the helpful responses–thank you–and reading assessments of Obsidian for long form writing by other academics, I’ve decided to keep my current workflow: Obsidian for PKM and a dedicated writing app for the actual writing work. Doing otherwise seems to be trying to force Obsidian to do something that it is not designed to do well. To use a bad analogy, it is a bit like using my SUV to haul stuff. It can be done–to an extent, but my truck is better at that task.
I also like having my writing in one spot. I do use Ulysses to send content to my site as the Obsidian plugin doesn’t do a great job.
If you’re interested in some of the features for writing check out the links to some videos I produced. If you’re happy with the two app still, use what works for you.
@curtismchale thanks for the response. By the way, I’ve watched a lot of your videos and they are excellent. Your videos are among my few top “go to” resources.
May I ask if you’ve done very long (near book length) writing in Obsidian that included footnotes? If so, in addition to the YouTube videos you mentioned above, do you have other resources that you would recommend that would help with this process?
I must be the only one who doesn’t like Obsidian. It is quite simply ugly. No theme solves this problem. Functionality is mainly driven by plugins that are here one day and gone another. I like the idea of Obsidian, but not its implementation. No matter how many times I use it the greatest friction is that I don’t like it.
