Automate some tasks for importing Typora created markdown files with math into Obsidian
A quick personal script I made to migrate my Typora-created, math laden markdown files to Obsidian.
It offers mitigations for these problems:
- No suport of HTML elements
<img src="...">in markdown source with target a relative path - MathJax years-old bug not honoring
\\line breaks in math expressions - No math multiline expression support inside quotations in Obsidian
\labelbreaks math expressions in Obsidian.
The script will warn and ignore remote images. Obsidian can't handle <img src...> elements with relative paths. This script replaces elements
<img src="path" ... style="zoom: 30%;"...>
with
that opens in Obsidian.
When present zoom is parsed and applied to actual size of the image from the image file.
If you want your images centered, you can add the CSS snippet
img { display:block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }
Obsidian renders math with MathJax so it suffers this 2019 bug. The mitigation here is to enclose all displayed math expressions ($$ ... $$) in a gathered environment, so an expression is transformed into
$$\begin{gathered}
...
\end{gathered}$$
As released, the script does this to all such expressions. Users are invited to fork and enhance the script so the fix only applies to expressions containing \\ line breaks.
Actually Obsidian doesn't support multiline equations in quotations such as this
>
> $$
> e = mc^2 \\
> f = ma
> $$
>
The mitigation the script does is to transform the quotation into a titleless admonition of type cite
```ad-cite
title:
e = mc^2 \\
f = ma
```
Admonitions are eased with the Admonition community plugin aq.
You can edit the admonition to add a title and add made it collapsible.
If you want citations be of same background color as the main text you can add this CSS snippet
.callout[data-callout="cite"] {
background-color: var(--background-primary);
}
In math expressions, labels (\label{...} latex commands) break Obsidian math expression parser. That unfortunately breaks the label,tag,eqref latex command associations. The script mitigation is to wholly remove labels, and only one tag command in an expression is taken into account and placed a the end of the expression. Users have to manually fix broken eqref mentions.
Get typora-to-obsidian.py
Install a Python environment.
If needed install the Pillow package
pip install pillow
Before running, backing up your markup files directory is recommended.
Run the command with
python typora-to-obsidian.py <directory>
The script will walk that directory and subdirectories recursively looking for markdown .md files. Each file, for instance name.md, is processed, and as result a sidecar file suffixed .obsidian.md is created (or overwritten). For instance, name.obsidian.md.
With this naming scheme, the script is idempotent: The results of running it once or several times are in theory the same. One can create an Obsidian vault at the base directory and compare original and transformed results and tweak the script if needed. On the other hand, once one is satisfied with the results, some pesky renaming can be needed that the script does not do.
Script apart, the following CSS snippets can be of use to someone.
/* Justify paragraphs */
.markdown-preview-view p {
text-align: justify;
text-justify: inter-word;
}
.markdown-source-view.mod-cm6 .cm-line {
text-align: justify;
text-justify: inter-word;
}
/* Increase MaxJax size */
mjx-math {
font-size: 105% !important;
}
Back your content directory before applying this script. Software is provided AS IS, no support is guaranteed and issues/complaints can be discretionally ignored.
This script is just my quick stab at this translating problem, providing crude solutions based on personal content and tradeoffs. Feel free to make it better.