A Few Snags With Obsidian Canvas

Canvas is a huge breakthrough, but there are some basics that need fixing.

I have spent only a few hours with the new Obsidian Canvas feature, available only to Obsidian insiders right now.

I am very excited by the opportunities that Canvas offers. In a nutshell, an Obsidian Canvas presents

1. A new type of obsidian file, .canvas , which when opened presents the user experience of an expansive tableau of visual objects.
2. These objects include embedded Obsidian file types, such as .md , .png, and .pdf .
3. The various elements on the canvas can be connected by arcs, offering a graph-like presentation, like mind-maps.
4. Also, Canvas-specific elements — ‘cards’ — can be created on the work surface of the Canvas. These are not files, but elements containing markdown. They can be converted to markdown files.

An Obsidian Canvas

I won’t go into a full run-down of the user experience — how to create canvas elements, zoom around on the canvas, or the like. Others, like Nick Milo — have provided video introductions.

However wonderful Canvas is going to be, soon, here are a few errors of omission that users should be aware of.

Transclusions — Transclusions of Canvases aren’t fully realized. For example, if I attempt to transclude an element of an existing canvas into a standard Obsidian markdown file, I can’t. I get the message ‘no match found’ when I attempt to search through a transclusion link:

I can create a transclusion link, but it simply displays as a new sort of link:

What I’d like to be able to do is at least have the canvas presented in a way similar to a transclusion of a PDF, so I can see it, scroll it, etc. And I would like to be able to transclude elements or sections of a canvas. (Note: at present, there is no way to define a ‘section’ of a canvas, which is something we will all want, soon enough. And of course, nesting canvases in canvases (which might also solve the naming of sections issue, too.))

Search — Canvas cards’ content cannot be found by search. This may be related to the transclusion issue, above. The example below shows this: