mu/TEX/tum – Obsidian plugin

mutextum (n.): That which has been changed by weaving — a document unwoven from its native form and rewoven as text. From Latin mutare ("to change") + texere ("to weave") + -tum (result).

A document converter for Obsidian. Import RTF, EPUB, CSV, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, and PDF files and convert them to Markdown. Mutare et notare ("To change and note").

Security and Privacy

See the security and privacy notes for information on what this plugin does and does not do behind the scenes.

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Features

• On-device conversion – All conversion happens locally; no external services, no API keys, no network requests, no system dependencies
• Broad format support – Word (.doc, .docx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx), Excel (.xlsx), OpenDocument (.odt, .ods, .odp), RTF (.rtf), EPUB (.epub), CSV (.csv), and PDF (.pdf)
• Right-click conversion – Convert any supported file already in your vault via the file context menu (right-click on desktop, long-press on mobile); the menu item appears only for supported formats¹
• Multi-note mode – Long documents are split into one note per top-level (#) heading, inside a subfolder named after the source file, with an index note listing all chapters; if no top-level headings are found, the document is written as a single note instead
• Link cleanup – Internal EPUB anchor links are removed; adjacent bold and italic spans left dangling by link removal are merged back into continuous formatting; jw.org links are stripped automatically, so tra.VER:ture can handle scripture linking
• Conflict handling – If a destination note or folder already exists, a dialog asks whether to overwrite, rename, or skip
• Optional frontmatter – Add YAML frontmatter to each generated note with source filename, conversion timestamp, and plugin version
• Desktop and mobile support

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Settings

• Destination folder – Where converted notes are written (default: Imports)
• Include frontmatter – Write YAML frontmatter in every generated note

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Known Limitations

• PDFs with image-only pages are not supported; these require optical character recognition; text-based PDFs convert normally
• Some PDFs convert with garbled text. The PDF's internal text layer is the problem, not the conversion; regenerating the PDF from its original source may produce clean output
• Encrypted documents cannot be converted
• Multi-note splitting is based on top-level (#) headings only; documents without any H1 headings are written as a single note, regardless of length
• Output quality depends on the source. Conversion preserves what the original document contains; poorly formatted sources, broken hyperlinks, or inconsistent styling in the original will be reflected in the converted Markdown (the converter cannot repair what was never structured correctly)

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Performance

Conversion is fast for typical documents, but very large files may take a moment. The source file remains untouched throughout.

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Installation & Updating

1. In your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory, make a directory (folder) called mutextum, if you don't already have one
2. Download main.js, styles.css and manifest.json and put them in that directory (over-writing to update)
3. If not already enabled, enable mu/TEX/tum in Obsidian Settings → Community plugins
4. In Settings → Files and links, enable Detect all file extensions so supported documents appear in the File Explorer and can be right-clicked¹

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Feedback, etc.

Feel free to get in touch and post any issues and/or suggestions

My other Obsidian plugins:

• con[VER]sum: GitHub repo, Obsidian Community
• in(REF)ens: GitHub repo, Obsidian Community
• tra.VER:ture: GitHub repo, Obsidian Community

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Footnotes

1. Obsidian only shows supported file types (like .docx, .epub, and .pdf) in the File Explorer when Detect all file extensions is enabled in Settings → Files and links. ↩ ↩²