Obsidian Markdown Filter

Introduction

Takes an Obsidian Markdown file and processes it for viewing in Marked 2. Set this script as a custom preprocessor in Marked 2 to make it work:

Overview

What does the filter do? The main idea is that the output of the filter is a document that can live on its own, outside of an Obsidian vault. To achieve that, it:

• Adds the filename as a level 1 title at the top, if enabled (see Settings below).
• Strips any YAML front matter (I can never get it to work reliably in Marked 2 itself)
• Strips HTML comments
• Replaces internal Obsidian links with just the text of the link, or with Obsidian links, based on settings.
  • If obsidian_links is set to true
    • [[Link to other page|Alias]] becomes [Alias](obsidian url to other page)
    • [[Link to other page]] becomes [Link to other page](obsidian url to other page)
    • [[Link to other page#Reference]] becomes [Link to other page > Reference](obsidian url to "other page" with anchor)
    • [[#Reference]] becomes [Reference](#reference). This will only work if the Processor in Marked is set to Discount (GFM).
  • If obsidian_links is false or not set
    • [[Link to other page|Alias]] becomes Alias
    • [[Link to other page]] becomes Link to other page
    • [[Link to other page#Reference]] becomes Link to other page > Reference
    • [[#Reference]] becomes Reference
• #tag gets styled as a tag in Marked Preview
• Replaces transclusions with IA Writer block syntax
  • ![[File to include]] becomes /path/to/File to include.extension
• Strips block IDs from the content
  • Text ending with ^block-id becomes Text ending with
• Strips emojis from the content, if enabled (see Settings below)
  • 👨🏻‍💻 Foo bar becomes Foo bar

In case the document being previewed is not in an Obsidian vault, this processor does nothing.

Transclusions

• A transclusion only works if the instruction is on a single line, all by itself. Obsidian is more flexible, but Marked 2 is not. I don't want to rewrite the source content too much.
• Transclusions don't work if the referenced file doesn't exist or has multiple matches in the Obsidian vault.
• Transcluded files are not processed themselves. So, nested transclusion don't work. According to the Marked 2 documentation it should work, but that's not my experience. I haven't looked into it further.
• I chose to use the IA Writer block syntax for three reasons:
  1. It has the cleanest syntax in my opinion.
  2. It works for many different file types.
  3. I use iA Writer myself, next to Obsidian, so I'm familiar with it.

Obsidian vaults

This filter looks for the vault the file being processed is in by locating the .obsidian directory in the directory structure, going upward from the current file. If this directory can't be found, the file being processed is considered not to be in a vault, in which case the filter does nothing.

Resolving internal links

The way the filter resolves references in [[internal links]] is by globbing for **/internal links*, starting from the root of the vault. This is not the same as what Obsidian does, but it works perfectly for me, because every one of my files has a name that is unique across the entire vault, allowing me to move files around within the vault without breaking anything.

Your mileage may vary though.

Settings

The filter can be configured per-vault by putting a file .obsidian-md-filter in the root of the vault. This must be a YAML file. Currently it supports the following settings:

strip_emojis: true
add_title: true
convert_tags: true
obsidian_links: true
convert_markdown_links: true
marked_processor: discount

• strip_emojis: remove emojis in the preview
• add_title: include the title of the note as an H1 in the preview
• convert_tags: convert #tags to styled tags in preview
• obsidian_links: if true, links in the document are converted to obsidian:// urls and will open the linked notes in Obsidian
• convert_markdown_links: if true, links created in the "portable" format ([label](link)) will be converted to obsidian:// links. Only use this if you don't have [[wikilinks]] as your default link type
• marked_processor: can be set to mmd or multimarkdown to remove spaces from the slug (#My anchor => Myanchor), which is compatible with the way MultiMarkdown creates anchors from headlines. Any other value will generate anchors as hyphenated slugs (#My anchor => my-anchor).