Changelog

Fixes w.r.t repository edoardob90/Roam2Obsidian

I tried go through all the PRs and forks of the original renerocksai/rj2obs repo to bring together all the changes from other people.

• AnweshGangula/Roam2Obsidian seemed like the best one to base off of.
• Then I cherry-picked 867def9 from lkhphuc/rj2obs.
• I didn’t need to incorporate anything from matthewwong525/rj20bs or any of the other PRs or forks or forks of forks as of September 2021.

I also added downloadFirebaseAttachments.py to download images, PDFs, and other attachments stored on Firebase by Roam to an attachments/ subdirectory and link to them correctly in your notes.

Your overall workflow will look something like this:

1. Run python r2o.py {linkToYourExportFile.json}
2. Run python downloadFirebaseAttachments.py ./md
3. Use Obsidian’s Markdown importer plugin to convert tags, TODOs, and highlights.

Note: I do NOT recommend the “Roam Research tag fixer” option of the Markdown importer plug-in. It caused more problems for me than solved by modifying the hashes in URLs. I wanted to keep the (cosmetic) distinction between #[[Links]] and [[Links]] anyway. The only links you need to worry about are the ones you prefixed only with a # but not [[, which you can just search for manually.

Some other notes:

• You also have to fix links of the form (custom text)([[Page Title]]) in Roam to the Obsidian format: (custom text)(Page Title) or [[Page Title|custom text]]. You can see all such problems by just typing [[ into the Quick Switcher in Obsidian and seeing which such incorrectly interpreted pages come up.

• You also have to fix links themselves being in page titles. That works in Roam, but not Obsidian. So for example, a page title like The History of [[Consent]] will not actually show as a clickable link or backlink in Obsidian. You can see such problems to by just typing [[ in the Quick Switcher and seeing what comes up.

• Remove colons, slashes, backslashes and pipe characters from all file names. Else Obsidian can’t move them around, update links, etc. You should do this renaming in Obsidian to change backlinks too, or else script carefully.

Fixes w.r.t. repository AnweshGangula/Roam2Obsidian:

• Handles broken Roam block references
• Change to the formatting of multi-line blocks
• Fix code-blocks references: they don't seem to work with Obsidian's embed syntax

Fixes w.r.t. repository renerocksai/rj2obs:

• Convert code-blocks into proper markdown code-blocks
• enclose any html tags in backtics so that they are not rendered by obsidian - eg: `<br>`
• replace any underscore(_) in the UID of a block with hyphen(-) as obsidian doesn't support "_" in UID
• Preview Block-Refs by default
  • I have a custom CSS snippet for my Obsidian vault, that style the block-refs to look similar to Roam Research

Roam JSON To Obsidian Converter

Converts Roam JSON export to Obsidian Markdown files.

I wrote this to convert my own roam export into an Obsidian friendly format.

Output has the following directory structure:

• md/ : contains all normal Markdown files
• md/daily/: contains all daily notes

Features

• Daily note format is changed to YYYY-MM-DD
• roam's block IDs are appended (only) to blocks actually referenced
  • e.g. * this block gets referenced ^someroamid
• Blockrefs, block mentions, block embeds are replaced by their content with an appended Obsidian blockref link
  • e.g. this block gets referenced [[orignote#^someblockid]]
• All notes are prefixed with a yaml header containing title and creation date:

---
title:   
created: YYYY-MM-DD
---

• Top level roam blocks that don't contain children are not formatted as list
• Roam blocks containing linebreaks are broken down into multiple bullets
  • roam:

        * line 1
          line 2
        * next block

• • becomes:

        * line 1
        * line 2

        * next block

Note: Please run Obsidian's Markdown importer after this conversion. It will fix #tag links and formattings (todo syntax, highlights, etc).

I might make it more user friendly and less hardcoded later. It did the job, though.

Install

No need to install. But you need python3. Google is your friend.

To install the required python packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

python r2o.py my-roam-export.json