Excalidraw¶
The excalidraw plugin turns embeds of Excalidraw drawings into images.
Embeds¶
| Syntax | Finds |
|---|---|
![[Drawing.excalidraw]], ![[Drawing.excalidraw.md]] |
The drawing note Drawing.excalidraw.md. |
![[Drawing]] |
Any note with excalidraw-plugin in its frontmatter. |
![[Sketch.excalidraw]] |
A plain .excalidraw JSON file, as saved by excalidraw.com. |
![[Drawing.excalidraw\|400]] |
A width, as for images. |
Auto-export files first¶
When the plugin's "Auto-export SVG" or "Auto-export PNG" setting wrote Drawing.excalidraw.svg (or .light.svg, .png, .light.png) next to the drawing, that file is used as it is. It looks exactly like the drawing in Obsidian. -O excalidraw.auto_export=off turns this off.
Drawn from the scene¶
Otherwise ope reads the scene from the ## Drawing section of the note (a ```json block, or ```compressed-json in LZ-String base64) and draws it as SVG. Excalidraw's hand-drawn look comes from rough.js in the browser. ope draws the same shapes with clean strokes, so the export needs neither Node.js nor a browser.
| Drawn | Not drawn (with a warning) |
|---|---|
| Rectangles (also rounded), diamonds, ellipses | Embedded web pages, shown as an outlined box with their link |
| Solid fills; hachure, cross-hatch and zigzag fills as straight hatching | LaTeX equations |
| Lines, curves, elbow arrows and all arrowheads | Embedded notes, PDFs and drawings inside a drawing |
| Free drawing, as a line of even width | Image cropping (the whole image is drawn) |
| Text, also inside shapes and on arrows | Element links and #^group=, #^area=, #^frame= parts of an embed (the whole drawing is shown) |
| Images from the vault or a data URL, mirrored images | |
| Stroke colour, width, dashed and dotted strokes, opacity, rotation |
Frames are not drawn, as in an Excalidraw export. Text uses the Excalidraw fonts when they are installed and falls back to a sans-serif or monospace font. The frontmatter keys excalidraw-export-transparent and excalidraw-export-padding are honoured. Dark drawings are drawn with their light colours.
For an exact copy of the hand-drawn look, turn on auto-export in the Excalidraw plugin.