Is there anyway to import a markdown document with with wiki links and have the wiki links to Scrivener links please? I am working on an Obsidian —> Scrivener, and Scrivener —> Obsidian workflows.
Any help on how I can keep the links working between the two applications would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Definitely not with anything Scrivener would be doing, but to my awareness I don’t know of anything else that could be of assistance either. It’s not something I’ve ever looked into, but “wiki links” aren’t something Markdown or any of the major variants make use of. The closest analogue are internal cross-references in MultiMarkdown and Pandoc, with the [Name of Heading] construct. I don’t think Obsidian supports that form of linking though, and it wouldn’t work for links to external files either.
That’s part of the reason for why I disabled the Use [[WikiLinks]] option in Obsidian, so that it uses standard Markdown syntax. That setting seems better for self-contained stuff that isn’t going to leave the vault without exporting.
Even so, using standard syntax doesn’t generate RTF hyperlinks when importing or syncing plain-text files either. So all you’re doing is making sure your links ultimately work beyond Scrivener, rather than being something you can also click on with the mouse.
Thank you for the reply. My issue with Obsidian is getting even Markdown links outside of Obsidian working properly. I do love it as a note taking tool.
From my experiments with it, it feels like a tool best used in an inward facing fashion, despite the premise of using .md files on the disk. It does it’s own thing when it comes to extended markup, despite there being good established alternatives elsewhere. The alternative is to sacrifice the use of features that depend upon that syntax and keep the full promise of having a cluster of .md files on the disk alive.
As for how to combine Scrivener and Obsidian (I use the sync folder approach), my philosophy is to consider Scrivener’s role the metadata and Obsidian’s the content—that is, for the area that is synced. If I were trying to use the two together to write then I suppose I would need a different strategy. But for how I use them together, for notes entirely, I am content to let Obsidian handle the text and Scrivener everything else. The notes can go anywhere I want in the binder, they don’t need to all be stuck in one folder. They can benefit from all of the stuff in the inspector, which is an whole area of usage that Obsidian does not touch, and thus there is nothing to integrate or worry about finding ways to sync. There is no summary/synopsis, no bookmark list, no sidebar notes, no snapshots, etc. Keywords/tags—yeah, but since Obsidian’s are all forced to be in the content itself you aren’t really losing them in Scrivener. They become search anchors rather than listed tags.
With that approach and way of thinking about the two, I do feel more free to use Obsidian nomenclature for a few things—to use it, as described, in an inward facing fashion where the .md file aspect of it is thought of more as a fail-safe backup than a feature. Where you use its custom syntax without thinking of the notes being pure Markdown or needing to function like them, or integrate with other software.
I’ll admit, that approach is not entirely my jam. I still have a somewhat uneasy relationship between what I feel is best practices (pure Markdown) and wanting to take advantage of neat internal features like back-links and graph view. Most such features remain for me interesting in theory, but until they allow for standards compatible approaches, to me a few convenience features are not worth a Markdown fork in thousands of notes, that I later have to account for in 15 years or whatever.
Thank you once again. So I should be able to sync my obsidian folder with Scrivener then? One thing I have considered is using Obsidian like a mobile Scapple and duplicating the info in Scrivener using Scrivener links instead for compiling out the info. The only downside I can see is the possibility of missing out info accidentally because the info is separate rather than shared.
It works well with folder sync! I posted some tips over here.
I am sorry to bother you with this old post, but could you elaborate on how you set up the Scrivener-Obsidian integration? I would greatly benefit from your strategy.
For my PhD, as of now, I’m currently using two Scrivener projects: one for writing the thesis and other articles and another for a “kind of Zettlekasten” where I take notes and import more in-depth literature notes (HTML converted to text) that I created in Zotero (which is great because of the links that point to the PDF and reference it in Zotero!).
But I feel I’m missing a picture of the “whole”. My wife only uses Obsidian for notetaking and Word for writing (I haven’t managed to win her over to Scrivener… yet). Anyway, I suppose that the Obsidian feature to see liked notes in a graph-like manner would be beneficial, and although I’m pretty sure it’s possible to set it all up, I’m stumbling on how to do it.
What I think maybe a workable solution:
Do you think it is feasible? If so and if it’s somehow close to your strategy, please share how you set it all up. Thanks!
I may not be the best to ask, as there isn’t much to how I use it; I don’t ask much of it, and what I do use isn’t specifically bound to Obsidian or any other one piece of software. For me it’s merely a folder of .md files that I can edit with Sublime Text or any other tool capable of easily working with a folder full of .md files.
By and large what links I use are either of my own syntax, or are made with the understanding that they will be within a longer document rather than between separate files. There is a big difference between these two, in that a link to another file in Obsidian might look like [[Name of Note]], or with the wiki link option disabled to produce compatible links, [Name of Note](Name%20of%20Note.md). But if I’m syncing Draft folder material, “Name of Note” is going to be a reference to some compiled header at some point, like ## Name of Note, which I would want to link to with [Name of Note] (as both MultiMarkdown and Pandoc will turn the latter into a proper internal link depending on the file type being produced).
Neither that nor my own personal linking syntax generate graphs, or are clickable in Obsidian (or pretty much any other tool). So I’m used to selecting and then use Shift+Ctrl+F to pop open a search with the selected text in Obsidian, or in Sublime Text / VS Code, copy, then Ctrl+P and paste to jump to the pasted text by file name matching. I guess it isn’t as ingrained as reaching for the mouse and clicking on a link, but it works fine for me.
So like I said above, I’ve never had much use for the graph feature and generally turn the module off. I don’t think it would work with Scrivener’s sync folder names anyway, as their parser won’t recognise that [[Name of Note [20]]] isn’t a link to [[Name of Note [20]] with a bare bracket on the end. We’ll probably revisit that at some point in the future, since this has become a popular way of working, and putting extra numbers and such into the name does get into the way of software that uses names meaningfully. It’s a bit tricky though, if you’re going to stick with the idea of using simple files, since there isn’t anywhere to put “meta” information (like where it comes from in the Binder) that is safe, other than the file name.