BEST of BOTH Worlds? Digitizing Field Notes inside Obsidian [Showcase]
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- Опубликовано: 1 июн 2024
- Storing physical notes inside your Obsidian vault? Today I go down the rabbit hole of trying to capture the best parts of your Field Notes into your searchable, taggable, and linkable Obsidian vault! With some added CSS flair, of course!
CSS Snippet: github.com/CyanVoxel/Obsidian...
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Chapters:
0:00 - Bougie Intro
1:05 - Yeah buy Why Tho?
1:56 - Scanning
2:31 - Cleanup & Export
6:12 - Thematic Magic
7:43 - Tips & Warnings
9:25 - OCR & Embedding
10:05 - Outro
Music Provided by Lofi Girl and RUclips Audio Library:
softy x Ludid Green - Lazy Afternoon
squeeda x Ambulo - Dreamsand
DivKid - Commander Impuse (RUclips Audio Library)
Kyakasha - Solar Reset
Software Used:
Obsidian, Affinity Photo
![Form, Function, & Fun! - My Obsidian Vault Tour [2024]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rAkerV8rlow/mqdefault.jpg)
![Darren Waller - Who Knew (Her Perspective) [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GytDjB8u6bM/mqdefault.jpg)
This is for people who enjoy the aesthetics of working more than the work itself
Yeah, I am so over it lol.
Im an artist and I have adhd so the look and feel of my notes makes a massive difference in how I remember them. Putting extra work into my most important physical notes makes them stick better and makes work enjoyable for me, which can be a common issue among neurodivergent people. It's a form of art. Not everything has to be bare bones. If I had to use the base text file in windows I would never touch anything I made. Just because it's not the system for you doesn't mean you have to trash on people who like it.
Work stops feeling like work when you spend time diving into the deep end of the niche corners you adore
This is overly complicated I love it. I think the process can be part of the pleasure and the result is really satisfying
Haha definitely! Going overboard with stuff like this when I’m given the tools is a blast for me. Sure it’s not the *most productive* thing in the world to do, but if you’re having fun then what’s the harm?
@@cyanvoxeli do things similar like this with automation scripts 😝 tinkering / the process is so much fun!
If you automated it all. then everything would be great. but you are doing not even double, but rather triple work. if I were you, I would either look for a good program to convert handwritten text into typed text. Or type on a computer, and draw in a notebook with transfer. or get a tablet and take notes there.
I'm so ecstatic to find someone else who is just as insane as I am, this is exactly what I've been trying to do !!
The sheer amount of effort. Just WoW.
The algorithm is doing its thing.
I hope those 25 subscribers blow up to 25k. 🤞
And now it's already 10X-ed.
Now at 17.4K - he's gon' get bigger
Wait… did he really only have 25 subscribers two months ago? Because it just crossed 20K 😦😃
I'm SO GLAD I clicked on this video! Genuinely made me smile out of joy of how awesome this is! Absolutely love the look and feel of the video, and all the depths you went into! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for, for YEARS! Thank you so much for making this! Subscribed!
Obsidian has a lot of features I wasn’t aware of the first time I tried it, this is wild!
just started getting into the idea of creating my own second brain, this stuff is honestly really inspiring and honestly makes obsidian a little more approachable to me!! love the quality of your videos dude, keep making more!
This is so awesome! I subbed already.
Even though I might not apply this technique myself but I am excited to see other people so passionately building things/systems for themselves and it works so beautifully. (well within the constrains of Obsidian ofc)
your content is just 👌 some youtubers are sort of afraid of getting technical but i love how you just dive into it
Great explanation and process. The CSS snippets look great.
Your editing on this video looks amazing.
Those are some mouth-watering notes you got there man, and I am actually happy that I found someone else who has the same interest as me, keep it up!
This is beautiful and so unique. I think this could work well with digital sketches and mind maps. Thank you for sharing!
WOW! What a awesome video. I recently started using a supernote for cramming every analogue notebook I had inside it and am thinking about data structure and organising my stuff over different systems, your video helped me a lot with some decisions and things I haven't even thought of. Maybe I should get back into Obsidian again. Keep up the good work! Hope to see some more of your future developments from your structure.
This is the coolest thing I've seen in like forever
Absolutely love your approach to this, I'm inspired!
This is so cool, and exactly what I needed to know was possible!!
This is my new favorite RUclips channel.
I love this video so much. It brings me so much joy seeing someone else who likes to keep data organized. I want to do the same but never gets it right.
I was just going to shoot an image with my phone and crop to what I need and insert it into obsidian where needed. Your way looks so much better.
That is a crazy amount of work to make it work lol. Love the effort to get what you want done man keep it up!
I love it. I’m used to using Notion for this but can’t customize enough, and as a software engineer myself this workflow and flexibility makes me giddy. Thanks for showing me the way. With the other video and you explanation on tags I’m looking into making obsidian my new directory UI
I'm in awe! Love it!
Holy shit! I am watching this video on my TV and I am impressed with the production quality of everything you do! So I jumped on my phone to say this!
Love your video, motion graphics, the styling of your notes (so retro! Reminds me of some notes found in games somehow). Your audio is also superb!
Really enjoy your content!
Wow, thank you so much!! (I'm just over here with a "fake it 'til you make it" mentality, trying to make something professional looking with what I have at my disposal!) Hearing this really means the world to me, I'm so glad you're enjoying the content and thank you for taking the time to drop a comment!
@@cyanvoxelyour content is very professional looking / sounding / feeling! I was wondering do they do this as their day job? They seem so good at this!
Man this is a good deep dive!
Thank you for making these awesome css snippets publicly available
Oh man, it is way toooo complex .
Note taking doesn’t have to be so complex. I use Obsidian in a very minimalistic way, and I enjoyed it even more !
It is esoteric.
this is just wonderful!
Excellent video!
Great video! You've certainly inspired me to change the look of my obsidian vault. I couldn't help but notice your organization system, maybe you could go a little more in depth on a vault tour one day? 👀👀
Thanks!! I've definitely got a vault tour/overview video in the works, in the meantime though I'm essentially using a combination of the Zettelkasten and PARA systems, and tweaking them to work better for me as I throw new types of notes an knowledge at my vault.
OK you need to calm the hell down, you're a madman!!! :D :D :D I love that you've migrated your analog notebooks! How cool is that?!?!? Thanks for your previous video on your process, your themes and your vault tour!! I grabbed the theme and it's so slick!! Now all I gotta do is take some notes and I'll be good! Oh, also what game are you working on?!? Loved that the alien's all "We eat gold." I need that on a poster.
Thanks so much haha! Glad you're enjoying the theme and the whole process! That note in particular was for a medieval/sci-fi crossover sort of tower defense and resource management game. Imagine mining asteroids for raw materials while also using the stone to build castle-like forts to defend against encroaching aliens. I needed a reason for the aliens to be so interested in the castles' materials, and thought "gold is their food" would be a pretty funny subversion!
wtf this looks incredible
brilliant. you should make a plugin video explaining how to really achieve your obsidian look. fonts etc.
Yes please, meanwhile while we wait, could you please list the Fonts that you are using?
@edgelimits Sure thing! For pretty much everything I’m using the JetBrains Mono Nerd Font. I’ll have a video coming soon going over that and everything else I’m using for my vault!
great video! most obsidian video are so text based and i'd love to see some that are more image based!
You sick psycho!
Thats cool 🤩
I am glad and disapointed at once that I do not need/do physical sketches.
Disapointed, as this process and system looks awsome,
glad because I would start build up same system for my own, and dissapear from family file for weeks 😋
Not sure about the number of people who want to spend what looks like 20 or 30 minutes scanning, Photoshop editing, importing, tagging etc on a single page of notes is probably pretty small. Fascinating that anyone would go to anywhere near this amount of trouble. When I want to digitize a drawing or something in my notebook I usually just take a picture of it with my phone, maybe pull it into Samsung Notes. Also Samsung Notes does a pretty good job of searching through handwriting text whether it's in the native format or an imported photos. This is about 50 times more work than I'm willing to put into it but the obsidian thing is something I hadn't heard of and worth looking into.
I’m sure that the number of other people who’d go though with this process would be low; For me, my thought process starts at “what’s the best outcome of what I want to achieve?”, then I build the process that accomplishes that goal first. If it’s something I wish to continue with, that’s when I’ll spend the extra time to optimize and create a more efficient process, compromising where I’m willing to. This is more a showcase of the outcome of this idea with a lighthearted journey through the process, not so much a recommendation for an efficient process.
For plain text notes, I don’t care so much for preserving them in such extravagant detail. When it comes to drawings and sketches, however, personally I prefer to have them archived in such a quality that I wouldn’t feel so disappointed if I lost the original copies.
And if Obsidian is new to you, I do recommend giving it a look and see if there’s something there for you. It’s a world apart from something like Samsung Notes I would say, but if you’ve got something that’s working well for you already then that’s great on its own!
1:37 "tag studio" notes, foreshadowing :P
The tan page style is fantastic and makes your graphics really looks like black ink. I also love your explicit properties, I might steal that for my minimal vault!
Some notes on the process, if you're not obsessed with high quality:
- phones cameras are pretty good at scanning with fair quality, if you don't want to invest in a scanner
- AI can help you remove the background behind a text, but I don't think the result can be as clear as yours on Photoshop (yet). It probably will be integrated to scanning features soon 😊
It's amazing 😍
Wow, I used obsidian way back, but didn't know of its possibilities to this extent... think I have to give it another go.
Honesty the way you go in depth with the customisation you could probably pull of amazing obsidian publish designs
That absolutely is overkill. Nice.
I like this. I like this a lot.
A lot of this is way over my head but absolutely loving your aesthetic and editing. I see the above comments about the css and your font- what theme do you run?
Thanks!! And I’m using the Vanilla AMOLED theme - I’ve actually got a new vault tour video if you’re interested in all the theming details!
Thumbnail is very pretty
That's amazing! If I had access to a high quality scanner I'd do this. I take pictures with my phone and embed them into obsidian but that's it. When I have some free time, i'll try to experiment with this and see how much it works from just snapping pictures with my phone camera.
If you’re taking pictures from your phone, I’ve used the Microsoft Lens app in the past that does a decent job at removing some of the distortion and can apply some filters that clean up the image a bit. You won’t be able to use the color effects I’m using since you need a transparent background for that, but if you’ve got software that can take out the white background then you can give it a shot!
@@cyanvoxelwow I didn't know that thank you for the tip!
Oh man, I hate how much I love it. Now to spend way too much time trying to automate it.
ngl this is extreme overkill for my use case but it looks so fucking good. Cheers for the inspiration. 🤘🏻
Many thanks! While any system I use needs to be much more lightweight, I will be taking some tidbits from here to incorporate.
Very tasteful
I feel like Obsidian is what all the people who used to manually edit their mp3 tags have been waiting for.
😅 this... is true
Great vid, thanks. What theme are you using?
This is madness
Have you tried using the Huion X Note or some similar notebook which auto digitises and scans the notes?
I have Notion too. So, you use this program in combination? I'm definitely going to look into this program too. This looks amazing!
I used to just use Notion, but then slowly came to fully switch to Obsidian. It does a few things differently, for example it doesn't have the same sort of "block" structure as Notion, but as a place to store and manage notes and documents I've really been enjoying it. There's also the Make.md plugin, which turns Obsidian into a more Notion-like experience!
I LOVE IT!!!!!😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭I LOVE IT
OMG this is AMAZING! I thought I was crazy for wanting really good integrations between my handwritten notes, iPad scribbles and drawings, and the endless customisability that comes with text-based notes. This is such a great solution. Too bad I don't have Photoshop though, would something like Procreate achieve the same outcome? Is there a way to make the importing of handwritten notes less tedious?
I'm exploring ways to streamline the process and make it more efficient, including hopefully skipping the whole Photoshop process! I've got a couple leads and will likely make a follow up video sometime!
Wondering if for a casual like me apps like camscanner wouldn't suffice to pre-scan the diagrams themselves.
But that's for after I backup everything digital, thanks for reminding me to check if everything works
This looks great!
I use samsung notes (I jave one of those phones with a pen) for my diagrams. I will try importing them into Obsidian, I think I can get them as SVG.
Did you try tracing your drawings to SVG?
Thank you! I used to use Samsung notes as well, although I always wished I had one of those pens! I actually have my old Samsung notes diagrams imported into my vault as well, but I wasn't able to do them as native SVGs. Maybe this depends on the type of brush used, too? Either way the PDFs I have exported all just contain embedded raster images.
For my handwritten notes though, I've been experimenting with converting them to SVG before importing into Obsidian, but I haven't found a workflow or end result that I'm quite happy with yet.
Where do you suppose I can go to for an in depth beginner Obsidian tutorial? There’s a fair few out there I know, just wondering if you yourself had one saved for reference. Thanks!
Is the date in properties from a plugin? I’ve been manually writing it in the title of my notes.
Do you still use field notebooks or was this conversion a one-time process to digital?
It’s been a while since I’ve used them regularly, but this process has reignited that interest so I’ll probably start carrying them around more again!
Thank you for sharing this video! I've been searching for a note-taking app that suits both my coding needs and my Japanese studies. Would be able to share your 'Japanese' class?. Really love how it look at 1:13.
Edit: I did figured out the Japanese page style. I love it.
At that point maybe you should consider investing into a eink note taking tablet like the Remarkable or Onyx Boox, that way you can take note wherever you are and still keep your handwriting, without the cleaning up process, and in vector format
I've been looking into it, actually! Currently I've been using an iPad with the Apple Pencil to take Excalidraw notes directly in my vault, however anther commenter (KnightmareProductions) brought up the RocketBook, which is a hybrid ink notebook that also "scans" the pages for you and can send the impressions it gets off to a cloud service. Definitely an area I want to look into more!
great video, the algo needs to do its job and give u more views. Have you considered an AI scanning this automagically I think you could make it speed up the work flow.
Thanks! I’ve had pretty bad luck with AI cleaning up photos like this, but maybe someday it’ll get there. If anything there might be some better handwriting recognition out there which could come in handy
what tool are you using to edit the photo?
Really great work!
I'm new to Obsidian and encounter one issue. When adding the Tags "page-white" the indented brackets stay black. Can you help me with that?
Thanks for watching! I'd be happy to help. Could you link me to a screenshot of what's going on?
@@cyanvoxeldrive.google.com/file/d/1jcBU_fCPkshroMrAV57HN3I5tSaJeSgv/view?usp=sharing
Nice catch! I just updated the repo, this should be fixed now!
@@cyanvoxelThank you very much!
Do you think you could beifly explain how you organize your notes, or link a guid where you learned how, I am looking to refactor my notes organization method, and yours looks clean!
Also amazing video!
I'm using a combination of the Zettelkasten and PARA methods, basically using PARA for projects and information and then Zettelkasten for my thoughts and linking knowledge together - I'm always tweaking the systems to work better for me as I run into issues, but I'd recommend looking into those two to help give you a jump start! (I've got a follow-up video planned where I got into more detail!)
Thank you so much!!
@cyanvoxel thank you!!!
first at all this is an amazing video so mucho inspiration! I´m trying for my own notes because excalidraw its too much perfection and I love my owen handwriting. After all, can you help me with something? whitch tool are you using for adding a color overlay effect? I´m stuck with that, I´m a newbie with affinity :c Thanks for your time bro
Thank you so much!! So in Affinity, the effect is actually just called "Color Overlay" and can be found in the effects panel when selecting the ink layer. Make sure that you're applying it to the separated ink layer I demonstrate at 3:03, or else it'll probably just look like a solid color being applied to the screen.
For multicolored notes, it's a little more complicated but not *too* bad. For those I'm creating a new layer and "painting over" the ink lines in the colors that I want in the end - but be *very* sloppy and don't worry about staying inside the lines of your ink, in fact you *want* a lot of overspill for this. That's because we'll be masking this layer with the original ink lines, essentially using the original separated ink as our "shape" this new painted layer as our color mask. To do this in Affinity, just drag the new color layer underneath the ink lines layer, and you should see it display as an indented sublayer (make sure it shows this indent or else the layer isn't masking, it's just sitting underneath it!)
Thanks again for watching, and let me know if that helped!
@@cyanvoxel omg thanks! I had to change the language of my infiniity but yeah that did the trick, sir now you have a new sub
how did you make your vault folders look so cool? 1:20
I'm using a custom CSS snippet that changes the colors based on this one: forum.obsidian.md/t/iterative-rainbow-folder-colors-css/21066 along with the Iconize plugin to set icons for each folder! Currently my own snippet is a bit buggy though, but I'll throw it up on my GitHub if I'm able to get it acting stable!
@@cyanvoxel cool, thanks for the reply
how do u make ur embeds look like that. mine embeds the whole page and i have to scroll a lot
Please tell me how to make the tree of files and folders colored like yours. And I will also be grateful if you explain how to make a font like yours.
For the colors, I'm using a custom CSS snippet based on this one: forum.obsidian.md/t/iterative-rainbow-folder-colors-css/21066 although my version of the snippet has some bugs with it currently, so I haven't uploaded it anywhere as of yet.
As for the font, I'm using "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono" as my Interface, Text, and Monospace font. It's a free and open source font you can download from JetBrains themselves or Google Fonts. In Obsidian, just change those mentioned font categories in your Appearance settings and you should be good to go!
How did you change the colors of your folder?
I'm using a modified version of this CSS snippet here: forum.obsidian.md/t/iterative-rainbow-folder-colors-css/21066
well, you also get an epaper writing tablet like remarkable or supernote.
I would be interested in how you made your pocket notebooks. A guide of sorts if you will
I don’t have a great process to be honest, but I’d be open to going over it in a future video!
Can you make a tutorial of how cleanup and export but on Gimp?
Final result looks great. But man, too much to actually doo if you take a lot of notes.
Muito obrigada
awesome if I had time for this. OR if someone wanted to do it for me.
I've been trying to figure out how to do the text extraction thing on GIMP & no matter how much I research & play around with it I just can't for the life of me figure it out. If anyone could help, I'd be super appreciative.
What are the font you're using? Please tell me🙏🏼
JetBrains Mono Nerd Font 👍
@@cyanvoxel Thank you!
@@cyanvoxel Thank you sir i already downloaded it and install to my font theme❤️
what font are you using?
JetBrains Mono Nerd Font! If you're interested in more theming details, I've got a Vault Tour video with more info!
how long does it usually take you to do this?
Scanning one of these 80 page notebooks at 600 DPI takes me around 40-45 minutes if the book is full. Cleanup in the photo editor can vary depending on the page contents (not needed for pure text, ~5 minutes for simple & clean lines, or longer for faded pencil work or multicolored lines). It's by no means a "quick" process, but there's plenty of room for additional shortcuts and efficiencies.
I'm new to obsidian. After following your steps, I'm not getting a dropdown list of available option in 'cssclasses' properties. Like 7:14
These show up because I have those classes already typed in other notes, so it offers them up as autofill options here. As long as they’re manually typed in some other note, Obsidian should remember that and make them available to autofill later. Usually I keep around a placeholder note that has all those classes applied to it so they’ll always be ready to autofill.
I’m also using the Completer plugin which I don’t *think* affects the normal Properties view, but I wanted to mention it just in case!
@@cyanvoxel thanks for reply !!!
❤
Jesus H Christ, you are next level, damn
How do you sync obsidian to ipad?
how do you make such pretty field notes!!
I want these on my wall.
It's great, but for some reason this doesn't work in my images, it seems like it's necessary to go through that tedious process, I mean it's very good, because you can have your drawings digitized and with that essence of being drawn by hand. Thank you so much for sharing it.
Did you know, if you used svg you can apply styles _inside_ the image?
Interesting, I've never thought about using SVGs in that way before. I'm not sure what the benefits of using an SVG with a baked-in style would be over using the native raster image with the style "baked-in" to the pixels though.
Hahaha I'm a fan of you
I thought you have some lifehack for scanning the journals. Otherwise... I don't think I am high enough on the autism spectrum to scan all my notes, that I produce at least one page per day, and then clean up each of them in photoshop. If some genius engineer comes up with an automated way to do it - I'll definitely pay for that stuff. It would have to run offline though. Otherwise I can just pay someone to scan my notes. Which I don't feel like sharing :D
Great video though, enjoyed the watchtime.
6:51 for me this does not work, i've downloaded the file, put it in the snippets folder and applied some of the tags. nothing changes. Help
Have you enabled the snippet in the Appearance settings?
@@cyanvoxel yep :/ also reloaded everything. I tried it on windows too. I think that I do something wrong because it does not work anywhere
@xel yes and it does not work on my mac but on py phone it works, any idea why?
Edit: I've reinstalled obsidian and it fixed it
Glad it’s working for you now!
What's the font you are using?
JetBrains Mono!
Why not just take photo (or scan) and upload into gpt4? Thats what I do, works nearly perfectly every time, much quicker/simpler.
I wonder if this can be fully automated
automating a 5 hour task in 3 months is peak programming 🔥🔥
I love it, but probably won't have time to do it. TnT
Can anyone tell me which free program I can use for cleanup and export part ? Thx
GIMP should be able to do this, although I’m currently experimenting with methods that should hopefully skip this step entirely
@@cyanvoxel well thanks for your reply, great video btw. What is the method you are trying rn for skip this ? Will we be a video soon or not ? This process is kinda scary for me 😄
Thanks so much! Someone’s actually come up with some custom CSS that would be able to pull off the same color changing trick but without needing to remove the background from the image first. I plan on doing a follow up video to this, but it will likely be a few weeks from now
@@cyanvoxel okey thanks while youre uploading I will try to use GIMP, have a nice day
Too timetaking
procrastination level hard