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elias-sundqvist / obsidian-annotator

A plugin for reading and annotating PDFs and EPUBs in obsidian.
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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[[Idea]] Retrieve metadata from PDF's with option to add as YAML #18

Open pcuellar opened 3 years ago

pcuellar commented 3 years ago

This is super exciting! Thanks for all the hard work. A couple suggestions/ideas:

  1. It would be awesome to be able to retrieve metadata from pdf's (authors, year, DOI, etc). Most pdfs have this already baked in, but it can also be retrieved via DOI numbers (like Zotero does). This is particularly helpful when creating dataview queries and to build networks of papers around topics.
  2. Having the option to add that metadata in YAML format. Mdnotes, the other. PDF annotator lots of folks in Obsidian use leverages this via Zotero/Zotfile.

Cheers!

elias-sundqvist commented 3 years ago

How do you envision this working? Should it be like a command that you can run which adds all the metadata of the current annotation target to the frontmatter?

pcuellar commented 3 years ago

That will be great. It can even be included as a property in the main command as an option (e.g.annotation-target-type-metadata). Bringing the metadata properly formatted to YAML on calling the PDF to annotate will allow folks to better leverage dataview for example.

One edge case further down the line are PDFs or books that don't have metadata. Metadata can be requested via API for PDFs to crossref for example (https://api.crossref.org/swagger-ui/index.html) and for books through WorldCat (https://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/web-services/worldcat-search-api.en.html)