PDF Report Exporter

Version française

Export any Obsidian note as a polished PDF report: cover page, header and footer bands, clickable paginated table of contents, styled tables, Obsidian callouts with their icons, Mermaid diagrams as vectors, columns, images — all driven by templates you can customise, duplicate and share, and pick at export time.

The plugin works entirely offline: it makes no network request, and the fonts it needs ship inside the plugin.

---

Installation

From the community plugin store: Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for PDF Report Exporter, install, then enable it.

Manually: download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/pdf-report-exporter/, then enable the plugin.

Desktop only.

---

Usage

Exporting

How	What it does
Export as PDF report command (Ctrl/Cmd+P), or the ribbon icon	Exports the active note
Preview PDF report command	Renders the PDF and opens it inside Obsidian — the quick way to tune a template
Export selection as PDF report command	Exports only the selected text
Right-click a note in the file explorer	Exports that note
Right-click a folder	Exports every note in it, one PDF each, with a summary at the end
Insert report frontmatter command	Inserts a pre-filled YAML block (today's date, default contacts)

When you have several templates, a picker asks which one to use (keyboard: ↑ ↓, Enter, Esc). It is skipped when there is only one template, when the note names one in its frontmatter, or once you tick Don't ask again.

The preview always reuses the same file and tab, so iterating on a template clutters neither the vault nor the workspace.

Frontmatter

The note's properties fill the cover, the header, the references page and the PDF metadata. Every key is optional, and English and French keys are both understood:

---
title: Website Migration Review     # cover + header (default: the note name)
client: ACME Corp                   # under the title in the header
subtitle: Infrastructure team       # under the cover title
acronym: INFRA                      # large, under the subtitle
author: Jane Doe                    # PDF metadata
logo: logos/acme.png                # logo on the cover (vault path or [[link]])
template: Report                    # force a template, skipping the picker
sections: [cover, toc, body]        # override the template's sections for this note
tlp: AMBER                          # optional Traffic Light Protocol marking
versions:                           # "Document status" table
  - version: "1.0"
    date: "2026-06-08"
    status: "Document created"
contacts:                           # "Contacts" table
  - name: "Jane Doe"
    role: "Project lead"
    email: "jane.doe@example.com"
recipients:                         # "Recipients" table (optional)
  - name: "John Smith"
    company: "ACME Corp"            # or `role:`, which takes precedence
    email: "john.smith@example.com"
---

French equivalents: titre, sous_titre, acronyme, auteur, modele, destinataires, and inside the lists nom, poste, courriel, societe, etat.

Recipients: the table only appears when the note names at least one recipient, or when the template turns it on. An entry with every field empty is ignored, so the block inserted by the frontmatter command has no effect until you fill it in.

TLP (optional): for teams that use the Traffic Light Protocol, tlp: RED | AMBER | AMBER+STRICT | GREEN | CLEAR prints the marking in the footer of every page. Without a tlp key nothing is printed — unless the template includes the TLP reminder page, in which case the report is marked TLP:CLEAR. An unrecognised value (tlp: rouge) raises a warning instead of being applied silently; WHITE (TLP 1.0) is accepted as CLEAR.

Markdown

Markdown	In the PDF
# Heading	Level 1 heading, in the template's main color, listed in the table of contents
## … to ######	Numbered automatically — A., 1., a) by default, configurable per level (see Templates)
**bold**, *italic*, ~~strike~~, `code`	Inline formatting
[text](url)	Link, clickable in the PDF for http(s) and mailto:
[[Page]], [[Page|alias]]	Flattened to readable text
- item / 1. item	Lists
- [ ] / - [x]	Task lists, with vector check boxes
List under a # Recommendations heading	Diamond bullets in the main color (can be turned off)
> [!warning] Title	Obsidian callout, with the icon and color of its type (note, tip, info, todo, success, question, warning, failure, danger, bug, example, quote and their aliases)
> quote	Quote box with an accent bar
| col | col |	Styled table. A table too wide for the page is fitted to it (see Limits)
```	Code block
```mermaid	Mermaid diagram, drawn by Obsidian's own Mermaid (light theme) and embedded as vectors. An invalid diagram is printed as code, with a notice
```col / > [!col]	Columns from the Obsidian Columns plugin, all three syntaxes
*Figure 1: …*	Centered italic caption

Only paragraphs starting with Figure, Table, Chart, Diagram, Illustration, Appendix, Exhibit or Listing (or their French equivalents) become captions; an ordinary italic paragraph stays body text.

Page breaks: put \pagebreak (or \newpage, [pagebreak], <!-- pagebreak -->, <div style="page-break-after: always"></div>) on its own line. A template can also start every heading of a given level on a new page.

Images: ![[capture.png]], ![[capture.png|400]] (width) and ![alt](path/capture.png). PNG and JPEG are embedded as they are; WEBP, GIF, SVG, BMP, AVIF and TIFF are converted to PNG. A missing image is flagged in the report and in a notice, rather than failing the export. An image repeated in the note is embedded only once, and an image reference written inside a code block is left alone.

Embedded notes: ![[another note]] inlines that note's content (up to 3 levels deep; circular embeds are detected). A template can switch this to mention only.

---

Templates

Settings → PDF Report Exporter. A template named Report is created on first launch. Buttons: new, duplicate, export as JSON, import a JSON, delete (with confirmation).

Sharing: Export this template writes a self-contained .report-template.json (images included) into the vault. A colleague drops that file into their vault and imports it from the same list.

Each template sets:

• Sections and their order: Cover, References, TLP reminder, Table of contents, Content. The cover always stays first.
• Headings and table of contents: for each of the six levels, its numbering (1., A., a), I., i. or none), whether it is listed in the table of contents, and whether it starts a new page; plus hierarchical numbering (1.1, 1.A…).
• Colors: main color, header and footer bands and their text, table header/body/border, links, table of contents title, body text, TLP badges.
• Typography: body and heading fonts, text size (one slider, 7 to 18 pt, that everything scales from), justified or left-aligned text, callout icons, diamond bullets, embedded notes, page margins.
• Cover page: position and size of the title, rule, subtitle, acronym and logo, in points from the top-left corner (A4 = 595 × 842 pt). A title too long for its place shrinks, then pushes the rule and subtitles down.
• Header and footer: text position, and the page number format (page {{page}}/{{total}}, {{page}}, Page {{page}} of {{total}}, none, or your own).
• Fixed labels: "Document references", table headers, TLP reminder titles… — editable, in any language.
• Artwork: by default the template draws its own decoration in its colors (cover bar and bracket, header and footer bands). Pick full-page A4 images from the vault to replace the cover background and the page frame with your own letterhead; the title, client, page numbers and markings stay live text on top. A default logo can be set too.

Global settings

• Output folder for the PDFs (empty = vault root).
• File name, with the tokens {{note}} {{title}} {{client}} {{tlp}} {{date}} {{version}}. Empty tokens are removed along with their dashes.
• When the PDF already exists: ask / keep both (numbered name) / overwrite.
• Default contacts, for the frontmatter command.

---

Limits

• Fonts: Liberation Sans (metric-compatible with Arial), Liberation Mono and Archivo Black, embedded in the plugin — which is why main.js weighs about 5 MB. Scripts they do not cover (CJK, Arabic…) will not render.
• Table of contents: entries are clickable, but have no dot leaders: pdfmake builds the table of contents itself and offers no hook for them.
• Wide tables: a table that fits as equal columns keeps that layout. Otherwise columns get widths proportional to their content, the font shrinks (down to 7 pt) if needed, and as a last resort over-long words are broken between characters — no character is added, so a hash copied from the PDF stays exact.
• Columns are not split across pages: a group that does not fit is pushed whole to the next page.
• Dataview and other dynamic queries are not rendered.
• Page size is A4.

---

Development

npm install
npm run dev       # esbuild in watch mode
npm run check     # tsc --noEmit (strict)
npm run lint      # eslint with the rules of the Obsidian plugin review
npm test          # test suite, including an end-to-end PDF render
npm run build     # check + production build -> main.js
npm run version-bump 1.2.0   # sync package.json / manifest.json / versions.json

Tests run directly on the TypeScript sources (Node ≥ 22.18, native type stripping) — hence the explicit .ts extensions in imports.

Releasing: bump the version, commit, then push a tag equal to the version (no v prefix). The Release workflow tests, builds and creates a draft GitHub release with main.js, manifest.json and styles.css; publish that draft once checked. Do not create the release by hand on GitHub: a release without those files attached is rejected by the community plugin review.

src/
  main.ts        # plugin lifecycle, commands, context menus
  exporter.ts    # orchestration: frontmatter -> document -> PDF -> file
  generator.ts   # Markdown -> pdfmake document, theme and decoration (pure, tested)
  i18n.ts        # English and French interface strings
  textScan.ts    # code spans, wikilinks, callouts (pure, tested)
  columns.ts     # Obsidian Columns syntax (pure, tested)
  images.ts      # vault images -> pdfmake image dictionary
  mermaid.ts     # mermaid blocks -> standalone SVG, through Obsidian's Mermaid
  svgPaint.ts    # computed styles -> values pdfkit accepts (pure, tested)
  assets.ts      # embedded fonts, template images
  fonts.ts       # the TTFs, inlined by esbuild
  storage.ts     # data.json: defaults, migration, file names (tested)
  icons.ts       # Lucide callout icons as SVG (generated)
  tableLayout.ts # column widths of over-wide tables (pure, tested)
  textWidth.ts   # text width in the embedded fonts (pure, tested)
  fontMetrics.ts # glyph widths (generated by scripts/gen-metrics.mjs)
  settings.ts    # settings tab: template CRUD and editor
  modals.ts      # template picker, confirmation, file conflict
  types.ts       # shared types

Credits and license

Code: MIT. Bundled components and fonts are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md: pdfmake and marked (MIT), Lucide icons (ISC), Liberation and Archivo Black fonts (SIL OFL 1.1).