Canvas Card-Materializer

Materialize Canvas cards into permanent, organized Markdown files — bringing Heptabase-style card-based note-taking to Obsidian, with every connection and color preserved.

Features

• Materialize — right-click one or more selected text cards on a Canvas and choose Materialize cards to files. Each becomes a real .md file, replacing the card in place; layout and arrows stay untouched.
• Structured metadata — every materialized file records its Canvas origin in frontmatter (see table below), so connections stay queryable data instead of one-off text.
• Native links — canvas_out/canvas_in are plain [[wikilinks]], so they show up in Obsidian's Graph view and backlinks like any other link.
• Visual sync — drag a materialized file back onto a Canvas and its saved canvas_color is restored automatically.
• Color tags — a colored card also gets a canvas-color/<name> tag (e.g. canvas-color/red), so Obsidian's native tag pane/search can group cards by color, Heptabase-style.
• Safe by default — filenames are deduplicated against your whole vault, not just the current batch, so materializing never silently overwrites an unrelated file with the same name.

Frontmatter fields

Field	Type	Meaning
canvas_id	string	The original Canvas node ID, used to identify files this plugin created
canvas_color	string	The card's color at materialize time ("0"–"6", or a custom hex)
canvas_out	string[]	[[wikilinks]] to other materialized cards this one points to
canvas_in	string[]	[[wikilinks]] from other materialized cards that point to this one
tags	string[]	Includes a canvas-color/<name> tag matching canvas_color (skipped when the card has no color); other existing tags are preserved

How to use

1. Select one or more text cards on a Canvas.
2. Right-click → Materialize cards to files.
3. Files land in <canvas's folder>/<canvas name>/.
4. Open a materialized file's Properties panel to see canvas_out / canvas_in — click through like any other link.

Installation

Open Settings → Community Plugins → Browse, search for Canvas Card-Materializer, and install.