ZD-Publisher

This project is in the initial stages, working towards a simple command-line mechanism that will publish an Obsidian Vault to a reasonable content website.

This is a necessarily complicated problem to solve.

Some overall goals of the project:

• support Evergreen notes as a source content style, for publishing emergent learning and content, as per Andy Matuschak's definition of Evergreen Notes
• support a means of structurally navigating content according to metadata (eg tags)
• support naturally navigating content from regular wiki-style links in your vault, eg supporting Maps of Content style navigation
• provide a mechanism to publish rich content based on metadata
  • with an extensible mechanism for content transformation that can support casual consumers of the emergent artifacts

Current State

Uses EJS as a template engine for markdown pages converted to HTML. Currently the default template is not configurable, but that's our eventual intent.

Recognizes type: presentation in markdown metadata as a content hint that the markdown is to be published as a presentation. Currently uses pandoc to convert that content to PowerPoint (PPTX) format. The template used is not configurable, but that's our eventual intent.

Installing ZK-Publisher

npm install -g zk-publisher

Running ZK-Publisher

Get a sense of the available options:

zk-publisher --help

The simplest usage is:

zk-publisher -s [Path To My Vault]

On MacOS, by default a vault you create called Main will likely be found someplace like $HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/Main.

If you do not specify an output directory with the -o option, a directory will be created called output in your current directory.

A temporary directory is required to hold an intermediate conversion of your Vault into plain markdown (done via obsidian-export). If you do not specify a location for it, it will be created in your current directory. Currently, the tool does not delete this temporary directory.

Runtime Requirements

You must have the following tools on your path:

• obsidian-export
• pandoc