Lottie

A plugin for Obsidian that plays Lottie animations inside your notes.

Install

Follow the steps below to install Lottie.

1. Search for "Lottie" in Obsidian's community plugins browser, or open its page in the plugin directory and choose Add to Obsidian.
2. Enable the plugin in your Obsidian settings (find "Lottie" under "Community plugins").
3. Turn on Settings → Files and links → Detect all file extensions if you want .json animations to appear in the file explorer. Embedding them in a note works either way.
4. Optional: pick a renderer under Settings → Lottie. Software is the default and works everywhere; WebGL and WebGPU draw on the graphics card.

Features

• Embed like an image — an animation plays where you put it in a note.
• Size and alignment — the same syntax images take.
• Open on a tab — clicking a file in the explorer plays it full pane.
• Live updates — editing an animation in another program updates it in Obsidian straight away.
• Select rendering backends — CPU, WebGL or WebGPU, switchable in settings.

Usage

Embed a .json animation the way you would embed an image:

![[spinner.json]]

Size and alignment

![[spinner.json|300]]        300 wide; the height follows the animation's proportions
![[spinner.json|300x100]]    exactly 300 by 100, proportions ignored
![[spinner.json|center]]     left, center or right
![[spinner.json|center|300]] both, with the size last

A size always comes last. If you write several alignments the last one is used, and anything that is not one of the three words is ignored.

Opening a file on its own

Clicking a .json in the file explorer opens the animation on a tab, scaled to fill the pane.

Obsidian hides file types it does not know, so .json files will not appear in the explorer until you turn on Settings → Files and links → Detect all file extensions. Embedding them in a note works either way.

Settings

Renderer picks what draws the animations:

• Software — draws on the CPU. Works everywhere, with no limit on how many animations a note can hold. The default.
• WebGL and WebGPU — draw on the graphics card. Far faster for a demanding animation, but each one holds a graphics context and the browser keeps only about sixteen at a time; past that, animations stop rendering and do not come back. Worth switching to for a few heavy animations, not for a note full of them.

Changing it redraws everything on screen.

Development

npm install
npm run build

npm run build produces main.js and copies the three release files into test-vault/, a scratch vault (not committed) you can open in Obsidian to try the plugin. npm run dev builds unminified with an inline source map, and npm run check type-checks without building.

Rendering is done by ThorVG through @thorvg/webcanvas 1.1.1. Obsidian only installs main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from a release, so thorvg.wasm cannot ship beside them: esbuild base64-encodes it into the bundle and it is handed to ThorVG as a blob URL at runtime. Without that, @thorvg/webcanvas would fetch the binary from a CDN and the plugin would stop working offline.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

The bundled ThorVG binary statically links RapidJSON (MIT), JerryScript (Apache-2.0) and libwebp (BSD-3-Clause). Compilation strips their notices, so they are reproduced in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md and summarised in a header at the top of main.js.

scripts/collect-licenses.mjs regenerates that file from a checkout of thorvg.web at the tag matching the installed @thorvg/webcanvas.