Introduction¶

obsidian-pdf-exporter (ope) turns a folder of an Obsidian vault into one PDF. It runs on the command line, so the same export works on a laptop and in a CI pipeline. It does not need Obsidian itself.

Who it is for¶

• Teams who write handbooks, specifications or procedures in Obsidian and hand out PDFs.
• Projects that keep their docs in git and want a PDF per release, built by CI.
• Reviews that need a tracked-changes PDF between two versions of the docs.

How it works¶

An export runs in three layers, the same layers the code is split into:

1. Markdown dialect. Pandoc reads the notes as Markdown with a fixed set of extensions. See Markdown.
2. Obsidian core syntax. A list of small steps rewrites what Obsidian adds to Markdown: wiki links, embeds, callouts, comments and more. See Obsidian.
3. Community plugins. Plugin support modules render syntax of community plugins such as Dataview, Meta Bind, Excalidraw or citations. See Plugins.

Pandoc then writes HTML, and WeasyPrint lays out the PDF with the CSS of a template.

flowchart LR
    A[Vault folder] --> B[Core steps and plugins]
    B --> C[pandoc: HTML]
    C --> D[Template CSS]
    D --> E[WeasyPrint: PDF]

What it is not¶

• Not an Obsidian plugin. It runs outside Obsidian and reads the files on disk.
• Not a pixel copy of the Obsidian reading view. The PDF is styled by its template, and some interactive features (folding, input fields, buttons) have no PDF form.