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Releases: NoteNerdOfficial/convert-to-markdown

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0.2.0

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@NoteNerdOfficial NoteNerdOfficial released this 06 Aug 03:09

Excel workbooks convert in full.

Hidden sheets were being skipped on the assumption that hiding one says the
data doesn't matter. It doesn't — hiding is a presentation choice, and a
workbook's hidden sheets are as often the raw table a visible pivot summarises
as they are scratch space. Skipping them quietly dropped the data the note was
about.

  • Every sheet is converted, hidden ones included. Convert hidden sheets
    in settings turns that off.
  • Skipped sheets are named, not counted. Skipped (hidden): raw data (monthly), Region, Agebracket instead of 18 hidden sheets skipped — a
    count tells a reader nothing they can act on. Empty sheets, and sheets whose
    worksheet part is missing from the file, are named the same way; the latter
    used to vanish without a trace.
  • Coverage is in the frontmatter. sheets_converted: 23/23 at the top of
    the note, so how much of the workbook made it across is the first thing you
    see rather than a footnote after two thousand lines.
  • Load-bearing hidden sheets are kept regardless of the setting. If a
    visible sheet's formulas, a pivot cache, a chart series or a workbook-scoped
    named range reads from a hidden sheet, it is converted and reported. That
    dependency is a far stronger signal than the hidden flag.

Nothing changed in how cells are read: dates still come out as dates,
percentages as percentages, and 27.38 still isn't 27.383982300884924.

Installing

Copy main.js and manifest.json into
<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/convert-to-markdown/, then enable Convert to
Markdown
under Community plugins. Existing installs update from within
Obsidian.

Desktop only.

0.1.0

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@NoteNerdOfficial NoteNerdOfficial released this 01 Aug 23:08

First release.

Converts PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and image files into Markdown notes,
with their images. No Python, no pip, no cloud service — nothing you convert
leaves your machine.

Each format is read through its own structure rather than one generic
abstraction, which is what keeps the output clean:

  • Word — heading levels from Word's own styles, ordered vs. bullet lists
    resolved through numbering.xml, tables, hyperlinks, bold/italic
  • PowerPoint — one section per slide in presentation order, title
    placeholders as headings, speaker notes, slide tables
  • Excel — dates instead of serial numbers, 27.38 instead of
    27.383982300884924, hidden helper sheets skipped
  • PDF — multi-column layouts read in order, headings from font size,
    paragraphs rejoined and de-hyphenated, running headers and footers dropped
  • Images — local OCR via Tesseract

Images are pulled out of every format and embedded where they sat — a figure
inside a Word table cell lands in that table cell. Identical images are
written once.

Installing

Copy main.js and manifest.json into
<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/convert-to-markdown/, then enable Convert to
Markdown
under Community plugins.

Desktop only.

Note on OCR

Converting an image file downloads the recognition engine and English model
(~9 MB) on first use, then caches it. The image itself is never uploaded. On
machines where that CDN is blocked, point the OCR engine folder setting at
a vault folder holding the two files and OCR makes no network request at all.

Known limits

  • Scanned PDFs are reported as an error rather than OCR'd
  • Column detection is geometric, so a layout with no gutter running through it
    can still come out misordered
  • Excel formulas export as their last-calculated value