research: Use PDF as Default Note View

[philips]

Now that #47 has been merged. It makes me wonder if I should just make the PDF view the default view and take advantage of all the niceties of that view in Obsidian. And then just use the command pallet for the features like convert to Markdown, etc.

[philips]

@james-xli What would you think of this?

[james-xli]

Hi @philips, thanks for thinking of me, sorry for the delayed reply!

This is an interesting idea. To be honest, I haven't used the Obsidian PDF viewer very much, but taking a quick look at it, it has very nice zoom and thumbnail functionality, as well as a 2-page side-by-side view. Using the native viewer + command palette would look a bit more polished, too.

One small pain point I've noticed with the current plugin is that there is a short but noticeable delay between clicking on the .note file and having the pages render (~1-5 seconds). If using the PDF viewer cuts this delay, that could be another pro.

The main con I see is that the recognized text would become hidden behind a command, rather than immediately available to view. I personally don't use look at the recognized text much because it's not very accurate for me, but I'm not sure if other users use this more frequently.

Overall, I would be interested in trying this out! I'm definitely not opposed.

[philips]

@james-xli Thanks James.

The delay is because of the processing time for the pages - that is a library thing - and it would happen whether they are encoded into PDFs or into images for HTML rendering. I suspect the time from click to display would be about the same.

The biggest hurdle is figuring out how to make it work.

[philips]

Posted a question: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/custom-view-that-uses-the-pdf-view/97206

[philips]

Looks like this plugin patches pdfview. So this is doable. https://github.com/RyotaUshio/obsidian-pdf-plus/blob/main/src/typings.d.ts

[oschl-git]

I think this is an excellent idea, as it is currently, I feel the pages are sometimes too zoomed-in with the default view and it's impossible to view an entire page at one time without changing the size of the window.

[james-xli]

@oschl-git Have you tried decreasing the "Max image side length in .note files" setting? That's the current solution for the issue I think you're describing (pages are displayed too large)

[oschl-git]

Oh, turns out I was using an ancient version of the plugin that did not have this option, sorry!