Show HN: I built an Obsidian plugin to create notes from BibTeX

With this plugin you can create literature notes from BibTeX entries, display formatted reference lists, and instantly generate citations.

Show HN: I built an Obsidian plugin to create notes from BibTeX
github.com

Great to see this. I’m using better-bibtex and the citation plugin currently in an extended workflow I’m calling the Obsidian Academic Stack. Would love to know if your plugin could enhance the stack.

What is the Obsidian Academic Stack?

I’ve been working on a stack which allows a workflow from Zotero > Obsidian > Pandoc > Word (with proper citations).

The idea being that essays and thesis can be written using Obsidan and then exported to word to be compatabile with the needs of other academics.

One key insight was that Pandoc supports Citation Style Language (CSL) so you need a workflow that supports CSL end-to-end if you want that a valid bibliography and in-text citations to pop out the end.

Here’s my overall workflow:

All your academic papers are saved into Zotero along with references to books, websites etc.

Zotero is synced to Obsidian, which lets you write papers and notes in Obsidian and add references to sources from Zotero.

So now you want to convert one of your Obsidian notes into an "academic paper". The tool you need for this is pandoc. The pandoc tool understands many academic referencing styles such as APA7 and Harvard. Specifically you install the pandoc plugin for Obsidian and configure that.

Once the pandoc plugin is setup; On the note you want to convert to an 'academic paper' you can run the pandoc command and it will generate a Word Document that automatically includes correct inline referencing and an auto-generated references section with all the references listed, at the end of the document.

I’ve been documenting it all here. Please star and raise an issue if you need any help setting this up.

https://github.com/evolve2k/obsidian-pandoc-academic-word-do...

So happy to see that Obsidian has a thriving plugin ecosystem. Been considering creating an Obsidian plugin as an excuse to learn typescript, but every time I wonder whether a plugin for $foo exists, the answer turns out to be yes.

Thank you very much for this guide.

I don't know if this falls under your project scope, but I have a suggestion.

By default, Obsidian saves links in notes using the "shortest path" , which reduces compatibility: the links don't work in anything but Obsidian.

I found two plugins that manage relative links:

https://github.com/val3344/obsidian-update-relative-links

https://github.com/dy-sh/obsidian-consistent-attachments-and...

I do the same except in Emacs. If it is useful, see the pandoc command I've created in .emacs to enable output to multiple formats.