Seems more like a dark age. Obsidian makes the fans on my 4 ghz laptop go crazy. And in some ways (integration with email and tasks) it has less functionality than One Note 2010. And Obsidian has a PDF view and PDF annotations, but you can’t search in it?
I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.
There is very little criticism of Obsidian here, but you definitely pointed a few out. I am a OneNote user and Obsidian doesn't really compare to OneNote. If you read a lot of papers, you can have OneNote OCR the text and make it searchable.
So, there is this tool: <https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf>
OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched or copy pasted.
This mentions cross-platform usage and seems simple. Is there some way to use this with Obsidian through a plugin? If so, please create a GitHub project and send us a link! :D
I have messed around with Tesseract a bit, and at some point, I was able to turn a PDF into a text file. I was thinking of doing that and having them as markdown files which are tiny compared to the original. Then keep the Original elsewhere. I've been playing with another PDF system I'm not willing to give up on. :D
Point is, I think I can bring more dimension to my Obsidian or Markdown library by having 'txt' copies of pdfs. The search and tagging alone would be so handy.
OneNote's PDF support isn't really for PDFs, though. It just literally prints the PDF as images onto a OneNote page and OCRs it. Makes for a really heavy page and none of the normal PDF amenities like doing highlighting within the file itself.
It's strange how inconsistent Microsoft's PDF support is... Edge is essentially the best-in-class PDF markup app on Windows, but OneNote PDF support is soul-crushingly rudimentary.
I guess expecting consistency from the org with 3+ mutually incompatible video call apps and 5 volume control panels was always a fool's errand, though.
No, the Edge PDF viewer has a much larger feature set than the Chrome viewer (although, I think sometimes for reasons I can't place PDFs opened with Edge do end up using the Chrome viewer instead of the Edge native viewer).
For personal notes I use Google docs. I want the experience to be a bit average so it becomes about the notes not the tool. I tried notion and most of my brain was going into notion. Once I had to upgrade to do something basic I left: I am jot against paying but I don’t think it is good enough a UX to pay for.
With Google docs 99% BPU (Brain Processing Unit) goes into writing the thing or searching or reading the thing. As it should be.
I'm not sure about the issues with your computer, but there are a ton of plugins for tasks and boards. What type of email integration are you looking for ?
I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.