Rollup to PDF

Turn a tree of wiki-linked Obsidian notes into one clean, typeset PDF — complete with a title page, table of contents, numbered sections, and styled callout boxes — in a single command.

Obsidian's built-in PDF export handles one note at a time, as-is. Rollup to PDF handles the whole tree: point it at an index note, and every line-leading → [[link]] it finds gets pulled in and nested one heading level below where it was linked — recursively, through as many notes as your outline has — until the whole thing is flattened into a single Pandoc-typeset document. No re-typing your outline into a separate export tool, no manually stitching notes together before exporting.

Good fit if you keep a wiki-style knowledge base, recipe book, worldbuilding doc, or research notebook in Obsidian and want a polished PDF of the whole tree. Not what you want if you just need to export one note as-is — Obsidian's built-in PDF export already does that.

See it in action

A note with a summary callout and one expansion link:

That's the whole model: → [[Levain]] under ## Sourdough Bread becomes a numbered subsection one level below it, [!summary] becomes the shaded overview box, and the title page + table of contents are generated for free. Nest another index note under another heading and it keeps going, as deep as your outline goes.

Authoring rules (read first)

For a rollup to nest correctly, write notes this way:

1. No H1 headings. Start note content at ##. Obsidian already shows the note name, and the rollup takes each section's title from the heading (or chapter link) that points to it.
2. Expansion links go on their own line, starting with →. A line-leading → [[Page]] pulls that page inline. Any other arrow (- → [[x]], inline →, ->) stays as plain text, use those for cross-links you do not want expanded.
3. A chapter is a heading + the link under it. Put a → [[Page]] directly under a heading; that heading becomes the section title and the linked page nests below it. A > [!summary] callout or intro prose between the heading and the link is fine, it stays as the chapter intro.
4. Keep an index page's chapter headings at one consistent level (e.g. all ##). Mixing ## and ### for sibling chapters throws off the nesting.
5. A bare list of → links (no heading above each) gives each linked page its own section, titled from the filename.
6. Use > [!summary] or > [!overview] for the grey overview boxes. Plain > blockquotes pass through unchanged.

How it works

The model is deliberately simple: every page is parsed the same way. There is no "index page" vs "content page" distinction. The renderer walks a page top to bottom, and wherever it finds a link on its own line starting with the → arrow, it pulls that page's content inline and recurses into it.

## Techniques

> [!summary]
> Foundational methods that recur across recipes.
→ [[Techniques/Techniques]]

becomes, in the PDF:

## Techniques
   [ Overview box: Foundational methods that recur across recipes. ]
### Techniques            <- the linked page's H1, one level below "## Techniques"
#### Knife Skills         <- expanded recursively from inside Techniques
#### Emulsification

The rules in one paragraph

A linked page renders one heading level below the nearest heading above its link. Two links under the same heading sit at the same level. A page's own headings shift to fit. When a link sits under a heading (blank lines, a > [!summary] callout, or intro prose between them is fine), that heading becomes the section title and the page nests below it; a bare link with no heading above it is titled from the linked note's filename. A new heading after an expanded link simply renders at its own level. Only line-leading → [[...]] links expand — list items (- → [[x]]), inline arrows, and -> ASCII arrows stay as plain text, so cross-links don't get pulled in. Cycles render as *[see: X]*. > [!summary] / > [!overview] callouts become styled boxes; plain > blockquotes are left alone.

Full details: docs/authoring-guide.md.

Install

Rollup to PDF is available in Obsidian's community plugin store:

1. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. Search for Rollup to PDF and click Install, then Enable.

To track the latest beta before it's released, or if you'd rather install from this repo directly, use BRAT instead:

1. Install BRAT from Community Plugins and enable it.
2. In BRAT's settings, choose Add Beta Plugin and enter this repo's URL (https://github.com/SVM0N/obsidian-rollup-to-pdf).
3. Enable Rollup to PDF in Community Plugins.

(Or install manually: download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css — if present — from a release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/rollup-to-pdf/, then enable it in Community Plugins.)

Configure

Open Settings → Rollup to PDF and set:

• Pandoc path — pandoc if it's on your PATH, or a full path (find it with which pandoc).
• PDF engine path — a Unicode-capable LaTeX engine, e.g. xelatex (find it with which xelatex).
• CJK font — a font installed on your system for Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyphs, e.g. PingFang SC (macOS) or Noto Sans CJK SC (Linux/Windows). Leave blank if you don't need CJK support.
• Page margin — e.g. 2cm.

Render

Open the note you want as the document root, then run one of these from the command palette:

• Render rollup to PDF (full recursion)
• Render rollup to PDF (max 1 level deep)
• Render rollup to PDF (max 2 levels deep)
• Render rollup to PDF (appendix mode) — see Appendix mode below

This plugin is desktop-only: it shells out to Pandoc and a LaTeX engine, neither of which are available on mobile.

Requires Pandoc and XeLaTeX (e.g. MacTeX / TeX Live) with the tcolorbox and xecjk packages. XeLaTeX is used instead of pdfLaTeX so non-Latin scripts (Chinese, etc.) render instead of erroring out. On a minimal TeX install (BasicTeX / TinyTeX), add the CJK support with:

tlmgr install xecjk ctex

Examples

• examples/Cookbook — a small, readable knowledge base. Open Cookbook.md and run Render rollup to PDF to see nesting, callouts, and cross-links in action.
• examples/edge-cases — a stress vault covering every behaviour (nesting math, the h6 cap, cycles, resolution rules, callouts, non-expanding arrows, Multi-Column Markdown, image embeds, CSS snippet styling). Used by the test suite.

Tests

The test suite loads the renderer logic directly out of src/ — there is no second copy of the logic to drift out of sync. test/harness.js bundles src/walker.ts and src/css-snippets.ts (and their local dependencies) with esbuild, stubs the Obsidian vault API with the filesystem, and runs the real walker that ships inside main.js.

npm test

Covers 53 edge cases (including Multi-Column Markdown, image embeds, and CSS snippet styling) plus an end-to-end render of the Cookbook example.

Appendix mode

The appendix mode command is an alternative render mode. Instead of expanding each → [[link]] inline, it moves the linked note's content to an Appendices section at the end of the document and leaves a reference where the link was:

**Covert Operations** (see Appendix 1.1.1)

Appendix numbers are positional: <section>.<subsection>.<n> based on where the link sits in the body, and links found inside an appendix recurse into deeper numbers (1.1.1.2, 1.1.1.2.1, ...). The main body stays short, a table of references, while all the pulled-in detail lives in numbered appendices. Same link, callout, and settings as the other commands; output is saved as <Note> (appendix).pdf.

Images

![[image.jpg]] embeds are resolved to the real file on disk and rendered as actual images in the PDF (not just their filename as text). Works anywhere in a rollup, including inside Multi-Column Markdown columns (below). If the embed's target can't be found, the PDF shows [image not found: ...] instead of failing the whole render.

Multi-Column Markdown

Notes using the Multi-Column Markdown community plugin's column syntax get converted to a real LaTeX multicols layout at export time, so the PDF shows actual side-by-side columns instead of literal --- start-multi-column: ... --- delimiter lines. Obsidian's own Reading view is untouched — this conversion only happens in the compiled copy handed to Pandoc, never on the source note.

Only the current (non-deprecated), ----delimited MCM syntax is supported, and only Number of Columns is read from the column-settings block — border, alignment, and column-width settings are ignored. Columns are separated with a hard \columnbreak (rather than relying on the text filling each column naturally), which fits short column content like a heading plus a single image.

CSS snippet styling

If a note uses a <span class="..."> with a class defined in one of your vault's enabled CSS snippets, the PDF picks up that class's color, font-family, font-size, font-weight, and font-style (mapped to the closest LaTeX equivalent — colors need to be a hex/rgb() value or one of a small set of basic named colors, and font-family needs to be installed as a system font for your PDF engine to find). Disabled snippets, and any other CSS property or selector shape, are ignored. This is a best-effort mapping for simple inline text styling, not a general CSS-to-LaTeX engine.

Permissions & behavior

This plugin does more than the Obsidian vault API alone allows, because rendering a PDF requires it:

• Filesystem access outside the vault API (Node's fs) — to write a temporary compiled Markdown file and LaTeX header next to your notes, to resolve the vault's real on-disk path so it can hand that path to Pandoc, and to read appearance.json and enabled snippet files from your vault's config folder for CSS snippet styling (above). All of this stays local to your machine and your vault; nothing is uploaded anywhere.
• Shell execution (Node's child_process, via execFile with an argument array — never a shell string) — to invoke Pandoc and your configured PDF engine. This is the entire point of the plugin: it's a thin, typed wrapper around a pandoc command line.
• Full vault enumeration (vault.getMarkdownFiles() and vault.getFiles()) — to resolve → [[wikilinks]] and ![[image embeds]] to files, since a linked page or image can live anywhere in the vault, not just beside the note that references it.

No network requests of any kind. Desktop-only (isDesktopOnly: true) because Pandoc and LaTeX engines aren't available on mobile.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.