PDF++: The Best PDF Plugin For Obsidian

if you are an obsidian user who frequently works with PDFs the PDF plus plus plug-in is an absolute Game Changer PDF Plus+ is designed to enhance obsidians built-in PDF viewer it streamlines your PDF workflow and makes annotating organizing and navigating PDF of bre from seamlessly annotating PDFs with highlights just by creating links to Advanced customization options PDF Plus+ has the potential to meet all of your PDF needs within obsidian in this video I will cover the plugins core features and share tips and tricks to help you unlock its full potential whether you are a researcher student or anyone who frequently interacts with PDF this is a must have plug-in there are lot of things you can do with this plugin I will be covering the main ones that can help you start using it right away before I start the video I want to thank my patreon members for supporting me if you want to support me as well you can do so by the patreon link in the description let's get back to the video and see how this plugin PDF Plus+ can help to improve your experience with PDFs in obsidian we'll need to install the plug-in PDF Plus+ here go to settings go to browse from comy plugins and source with PDF plus and you have it here by rooto usio I guess I'm pronouncing that name right install this plugin the most obsidian native PDF annotation tool La this is an obsidian plugin for better PDF experience enable the plugin let me close this window let me open a PDF that I have in my world this is a book called hacking with Mac OS that I'm reading currently before we start to explore this plugin let's see how the native PDF viewer is in obsidian for that you'll need to disable the PDF Plus plugin and I'll reopen the PDF this is a PDF and you can highlight sting section of this PDF by copying a link to selection or copying as a code I'll copy it as a code and I'll create a new note Untitled and add it over here and it will add a link to this node if I click on it it will take me back to this note and show me the highlights but if I click anywhere over here the Highlight will disappear if I perform the copy link to selection the link will be copied without the quote like this this is copied as call out and this is copied as link only and if I click on this link it will take me back to the same page and show me the annotations or highlights but if I click anywhere over here it will disappear I'll delete this new note called Untitled and let me enable the plugin enabling the plugin PDF plus introduce a new toolbar over here now let's see how this plugin PDF Plus+ makes annotations better in obsidian the first way is by introducing the backlink highlighting whenever you want to annotate the text or highlight the text you will need to copy a link to selection and add it in a new node and if you add it over here the text will be highlighted in our PDF and if I click on it it will take me back to the same section of the PDF but clicking anywhere on this PDF will not make this highlight disappear which was happening in the case of obsidian native PDF viewer this backlink highlighting feature allows you to double click on this highlighted text in the PDF itself and it will take you back to the place where you have your highlight obsidian's Nat PDF viewer doesn't have this backlink highlighting feature but the PDF Plus plugin introduces this feature double clicking on the Highlight will take you back to the note where you have your highlights with the native PDF viewer it's hard to view what parts are referenced in our PDF but but this plugin PDF plus introduces colors highlighting where you can see the highlights easily with different colors you can see it here on the toolbar there are different colors which you can use in order to highlight the text in the PDF you can select a text and use a different color and paste it in a new note where you want to add it and the Highlight will appear on the PDF once you have added the text if you don't want to use the highlighting feature you can also Al trade it with the underline you can go to PDF plus and you can choose the Highlight style backlink highlighting and highlight style you can choose underline and the text will be underlined over here but I prefer highlight and I'll choose highlight now let's talk about the toolbar where you have these different color ballots you can also customize these Colors by going into the settings PDF plus go to option if you go down into this back CL highlighting you can choose different colors from here click on the color figure and choose the color that you want and that color will be applied over here currently I don't think you can add more colors but these four colors are sufficient for most of the use cases you can select a text use the color and it will copy the link with the text and you can add it into a new note and the Highlight will be visible in the PDF you can also add a comment for that particular highlight like this now let's talk about these two toolbar icons the first one here is for text format and the second one is for title format this one here is for text format right now we have selected quote in call out that's why when we paste the highlight it is displaying in call out this one here is for display link and we have selected title and page that's why it's showing title that is the title of the PDF and Page let's change this to page and see how it works if you select it color and add it you will see it's now only displaying page over here because that's what we selected in the display link format also you can change the display text format with you can choose quote link only inate call out or quote call out if you choose different ones for example if you choose a quote text format it will look like this if you choose embed it will embed that particular part of the PDF you can see here I chose the text format as Ed and if you paste it into a note it will embade like this I feel like the best setting for these two option is is quot in call out and title and phage because the quot in call out allows you to easily add a comment you can see here if I select a text use a color and paste it you can see I can add a comment easily over here within that particular annotation so this is a good format for both display text and display link format now there is another tool which is rectangular selection this rectangular selection allows you to embade a rectangular selection from the PDF if you click on it and let's create a rectangular selection and the link will be copied now if you go to a note where you want to add those highlights you can paste it and now you can see the rectangular selection is added over here clicking on this image will take you to the same point where you have that rectangular selection in the PDF double click and it will take you back to that particular selection you can choose to either init the rectangular section from the PDF or you can create a image of the rectangular selection from the plugins menu if you go to the plugin settings and go down over rectangular selection imit there's no need to be overwhelmed with all these options which you see here most of them you don't even have to touch them this is a rectangular selection imeds where you can paste the selection rectangular selection as a image or whether you want to just inate from that particular uh PDF if you enable the past at image option there are different option how do you want to embed this image the image file format and others so I'll leave it at default now let's talk about another important feature of this PDF Plus plugin which is PDF editing if you go to settings uh you have this in the beginning of this plug-in editing PDF files to make the best of PDF plus powerful features it is strongly recommended to enable PDF editing by allowing PDF plus to modify PDF files directly you can add edit and delete highlights and links in PDF files add insert delete or extract PDF pages and out update links add rename move or delete outline items and edit page labels if you enable this option PDF editing you'll need to add The annotation author which I'll write my name one of the best thing that I found about this PDF editing feature is that if you enable the PDF editing mode all the annotations that you make inside obsidian will be visible outside of CDN app as so this is a really great addition you will also have to be cautious because it will modify files which might lead to data corruption so make sure you have a backup of your files another thing that you can do by enabling the edit mode is to split the PDF into two parts if you have a large PDF like this is a 750 Pages PDF a large PDF file will always have performance issues such as slow loading and lagging Etc and if you want to increase the loading Speed and Performance then you can split this PDF into two parts you can go to command pallet and search for PDF ++ and if you go down you will see this option to divide this PDF into two files at this page it will divide this PDF file from this page 324 page into two parts and unlike other PDF tools breaking this PDF into two parts will not cause any problem with the linking because when this plugin divides the PDF into two parts it will also auto update all the Links at the same time so you will have no problem with the linking feature even if you divide the PDF into two parts you can make The annotation and highlighting workflow more smooth and easier by using the autobase feature if you go to command pallet and search for autop paste you can see here PDF plus as autop paste command it will be best to add a hot key to the command source for Auto and here you have copy and autop paste link to selection or annotation you can use a command such as I'll use command p and now whenever you select a text you can use the hotkey command V and it will automatically add that into our new node and you can also configure how this new node is selected if you go to settings of this plugin PDF plus if you go down you will uh find this autop paste autofocus and autop paste section autofocus marked down after copying link from PDF if you enable this option the last active note or the note that you last pasted a link to will be focused automatically after copying a link so you can use the simple command control+ V and paste The annotation and highlight or you can also use the autoc copy and auto paste hotkey that we used previously then this is autofocus Target and autop paste Target autofocus Target you can select different one such as last pasted markdown file if any otherwise last active and open markdown or you can also choose different ones there are these options both autofocus Target and autofac target has the same option let me enable the autofocus markdown after copying link from PDF and show you how it easy it will be for example if I select this text that I want to annotate or highlight and select it it will be automatically focused into uh this node I did not do nothing I just clicked on control V and the is over here or you can also use the autoc copy and auto paste command control p and it will be added over here you can also add comment this is a comment and as I previously told you you can configure the display text and display link from here now there's one another way you can can make this workflow more efficient that is by using the fob editor because opening this PDF in a small window doesn't give the best experience in my opinion so you'll need to install po editor if you have not installed it you can go to settings go to compy plugins browse Source per hover hover editor with around $200,000s enable this plugin and go to PDF plus options and you will need to go to the auto focus and auto paste section again autofocus and auto paste over here you will need to choose this how to open the target mown file when not open and here we'll choose hober editor and this option will only be available if you have installed the hober editor plugin now let me use the hotkey autofocus and autobase let me select this text and it is automatically added to the corser position you can uh pin this node so that it always stays on the top select the text use the command contrl p and the link is automatically copied and past it I don't know why it's not showing in the hob right hob edor right now you can just select a text use the command and it will be added into this new window automatically but I don't know why the H edor is not working right now okay now it's working I didn't know why it did not work previously copy it paste it add a comment annotate again copy it paste it add a comment so this is a really cool plugin for obsidian if you uh have to deal with a lot of PDFs and you have to deal with a lot of reading annotation and highlights back link and highlighting feature along with other features that you can see there are a lot of options that you can configure uh in this plugin you can check them out by yourself but these are the main core features of this plugin highlight annotations PDF editing ET I hope you found this video useful if you found this video useful please don't forget to like the video and subscribe to the channel because I'll be coming with more obsidian related content in the future have great time thank you for watching bye-bye

Channel: Prakash Joshi Pax

Views: 2,609

Keywords:

Id: 4dU6WXULSqg

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024