Obsidian for University:
Practical Introduction for “non-STEMians”
Intro - optional read
After working in Word for a long time (10+ years), I realized that while it’s functional for many purposes, it doesn’t meet my needs for research and knowledge retention. That’s why I love Obsidian, it’s just too good to structure and organize thoughts and research projects. Leonardo Castorina has a good article explaining why Obsidian is a great choice for academia. It btw. also works on my PC (Windows) as well as on my Laptop running Linux! However, the PDF export options with latex available were a little bit too much, especially with full-blown dissertation templates that felt like overkill for simpler projects like coursework, or just too ugly to hand it over at my Institute. To avoid leaving Obsidian and transferring my work to Word—which often involved painful copying, rearranging, and formatting—I took inspiration from the Eisvogel templates and fiddled around until i had my own LaTeX template. This allows me to export clean, professional-looking PDFs directly from Obsidian without leaving the ecosystem. The template is flexible, as it utilizes Obsidian’s YAML frontmatter to dynamically fill out the document and apply specific formatting options. For example, I can include a table of contents for papers while omitting one for essays, depending on the document type. So i can concentrate on reading and writing and never again have to worry about the typesetting. In the following guide, I also walk you through how to customize this template (see 4) Customizing the Templates) and share some useful plugins in the 1) Overview that enhance Obsidian’s functionality for writers, at least in my opinion. Now there might be even better ways to set this up, but I tried a lot of Stuff until I got it working properly. That’s why I called it for “non-STEMians” - if you code, you can probably figure this out by yourself. If on the other hand you share some of the same struggles, I invite you to take a look around, and consider this as starting point.
Overview:
Content:
Following this Setup will leave you with a practical Obsdiaian.md setup for writing - Documents for University (LaTeX-Export), or other Text focussed stuff. If you are heavy into coding this might be nothing brand-new to you, but I figured it’s a little setup still and so I tried to condense it into this. This is not a Tutorial explaining all Obsidian features, but rather the features i heavily use to reasearch and write.
Learn how to:
- have consistent PDF-Exports for submissions in University.
- have a practical Vault config for academic research
Warning
- I had no problems installing and so should you, but backing up does not hurt.
- If you have problems or questions you can open up a issue on my .latex-template github.
Preview:
These below are just screenshots, you can check out the Preview-Paper.md
and the Preview-Paper.pdf on my GitHub for better quality (and with TOC) - will be linked in the download section. Be aware that Geometry for my Template is set to 6cm right margin, which is the standard of my Institute, but I changed it in the Template to 3cm. So if you wonder why your test export looks a little bit different, it’s because of this.
Click me for Preview!
Title Page
Text Page
Bibliography
Legal Notice
GitHub:
Start here
A) General Setup
- 1) Vault-Setup
- 2) Download and Install
- 3) Setting up PDF-Export
- 4) Customizing the Templates
- 5) Table of Contents - TOCi
- 6) The Body
- 7) Bibliography in the Body
B) Setting up the Plugins
- 1) Overview
- 2) LanguageTool
- 3) PDF++
- 4) Writing Goals
- 5) Editing Toolbar
- 6) Text Snippets
- 7) Hover Editor
C) Tips
Thanks!
I hope this proves somewhat helpful to you. If you’d like to show appreciation, feel free to buy your fellow student a coffee.
Best regards,
J
