Using Obsidian’s Canvas plugin
Canvas is eerily similar to a feature that I collaborated on with (now-ex) colleagues at Mindef and CSIT a few years ago. That they conceived of it so early on and built a prototype shows how ahead of the times they were!
What is Canvas? It’s a blank screen on which you can paste existing Obsidian notes, pictures and raw text, and then join them to each other. It’s a core plugin, so as long as you have the latest version of Obsidian, you’ll have access to Canvas. I won’t go through the full mechanics of Canvas because Nicole Van Der Hoeven does a great job here.
What Canvas won’t do yet
Because Obsidian users will ask, here are some of the caveats to Canvas at the moment.
- Canvas works only in desktop Obsidian
- Raw text boxes you create in Canvas will not show up in a search, even though they exist as plain text in the Canvas json file.
3. Arrows drawn between two Obsidian notes in Canvas will not create a markdown link between those notes. So if “Chief’ and “Deputy Chief” were notes, linking them in Canvas would not automatically create a “[[Deputy Chief]]” link in the “Chief” note and vice versa.
