ZIM Reader

Read offline ZIM archives — the format used by Kiwix for offline Wikipedia and other wikis — directly inside Obsidian. Point the plugin at a local .zim file, search by title, and read articles with working internal links and images, without any external server or process.

Everything is read on demand straight from disk: only the file header, the search indexes, and one decompressed cluster at a time are ever touched, so a 38 GB Wikipedia archive opens instantly and uses almost no memory.

Usage

1. Enable the plugin.
2. In Settings → ZIM Reader, click Browse… and pick your .zim file. Add as many archives as you like — Wikipedia, Wiktionary, a medical reference… Get archives at https://library.kiwix.org.
3. Open the reader from the ribbon (the W icon) or the command Open ZIM Reader.
4. Type a title, pick a result, and read. Internal links, images, the Random article button, and back/forward all work. With two or more archives a switcher appears in the toolbar.
5. Use Add to notes to save the current article as a Markdown note (with its images) into your vault.

Notes

• Desktop only. ZIM archives are often tens of gigabytes and need random-access file reads, which the mobile app cannot provide.
• Filesystem access. The plugin reads your .zim file directly with Node's fs module, because the archive lives outside the vault and is far too large for the vault API. It only reads the archive you point it at, and only writes when you use Add to notes. There is no network access.
• Zstandard compression is supported (modern ZIM). Full-text (Xapian) search is not implemented yet — search is by article title.
• Articles are rendered in a clean, theme-aware reading layout rather than the original wiki skin.

Credits

Zstandard decompression by fzstd (MIT), inlined into main.js (see fzstd-LICENSE). ZIM is an open format by the openZIM project.

License

MIT