these are my pocket notebooks a few years back I decided to give the whole field notes thing a go to see if keeping a small notebook on me would help keep me organized and help capture any fleeting thoughts and ideas I had on the go not even being sure if it was for me at the time I decided to make my own notebooks from scratch before committing to spending anything on big packs or subscriptions but this would only end up getting me even more attached to these things with the tactile satisfaction of writing in them and the joy of seeing my ideas and sketches accumulate remaining unrivaled that was until I really started getting into obsidian obsidian is a simple yet extraordinarily powerful piece of note-taking software not only have I been using it to keep track of notes and documents for projects but it's become a sort of second brain for me as well and that's why this program has such a thriving Community surrounding it with countless plugins and discussions on different ways to use it likewise things like field notes also have big communities surrounding them and for good reasons too today though I'm going to be taking you through what I've been doing to combine the analog Bliss and ease of use of taking physical notes with the search of taggable linkable and endlessly powerful digital notes of [Music] obsidian when I started bringing over my existing notes from other platforms and mediums I was faced with a lot of questions about how I want all of them to look and feel while I really like the white on black monospace look I have going with my obsidian and notion notes it felt wrong to try and boil down the look and feel of my pocket notebooks to fall in line with that and in a lot of notetaking software that would just be the end of it but with the incredible customization options that obsidian offers with per note CSS I realized that I had the ability to retain the best parts of my handwritten notes I wanted to be able to search for link to and organize my pocket notebook Pages inside of obsidian as if they were first class digital notes and I think I've managed to do that here with some extra potential I'll go over near the end but for now I'll walk you through the process that I'm using to integrate my field notes into my obsidian fold first things first I needed to take scans of all my notebooks I used a regular flatbed scanner set at 600 DPI in order to get some Crisp Images at manageable file sizes I don't see you needing to scan at any higher resolution than that but I also wouldn't recommend going any lower it's also up to you if you just want to scan in black and white but I wanted a true Archive of my notebooks including the different pen colors I've used lastly I recommend you either save these as pgs or at the very least highquality jpegs regular jpegs are going to leave nasty artifacts around the line work which is going to make things a lot harder for us in the cleanup phase isn't turning through each page of your notes one by one at a snail space fun yeah it's not the best way to spend an afternoon but you only have to do it once even if I wasn't going to do anything fancy with these I still like having that backup of my physical data you back up your hard drive so why not back up your notebooks wait you don't back up your hard drives you should really get on that anyway let's clean up these scans and get them into obsidian I'm using Affinity photo for this but you could use Photoshop or or whichever capable program you'd like the process for this may differ depending on the papers and pens just the quality of your scan but in the end we're just going to try to do the same thing separate the ink from the page the magic wond tool is going to be your best friend here and you can start by selecting either the ink itself or the pain behind it you're going to want to make sure that the W tool has contiguous mode turned off so that it tries selecting similar colors across the whole page even if they're not physically connected to each other I found that a tolerance level around 20% worked best for me but in some drier pens I had to turn that down to as low as 10% in affinity photo you have this refine option that anti- alyses and Smooths out the selection after the fact but Photoshop should do this for you automatically but if you do have this refine menu I'd also recommend turning down the Border width to zero or at least get it low enough so that it doesn't bleed out the selection too much once we have what we think is a good selection go ahead and copy this to a new layer if you selected the page color earlier instead of the ink lines make sure to invert your selection before copying now I've got this new layer that should just be the ink next I'm going to apply a color overlay effect and pick a color that's close enough to the original ink if we add a plain white layer behind it you'll see the ink pop out from the page but it doesn't stop there later on we'll actually be able to change this color inside of obsidian so if all your notes are made in Black Ink anyway then you can just keep this black there'll probably be a bunch of junk around the corners but that'll be easy to clean up with the Eraser one trick I use when cleaning up photos like this is to add a temporary stroke effect that will reveal all the sorts of little straight pixels that would usually be pretty tough to see with the naked eye during this whole process I encountered a lot of forks in the road and this is going to be one of them first off any grid lines or page lines that's up to you if you want to keep them personally I try leaving them behind and just sticking with my pen work but it's not always easy with the selection process especially if you're writing with pencil but I think it carries over some character anyway so I'm perfectly fine with it if a lot of your notes are well just text it's up to you how you want to transcribe those for me any notes that are just pages of text I just type directly into obsidian nothing fancy about it besides a little bit of theming later on but several of the sketches and D diagrams I made also have some sort of text in them what do I do with that well you could replace and transcribe the text for those here while editing the image in fact you could completely recreate the diagram either here incalad draw draw that. or any diagram software you like me though I prefer the original look of my handwriting in imperfect lines it retains an important part of the character of The Notebook and it's a pleasure seeing my old sketchy show up in my fault no matter what you shoose though I think it's time we finally brought these things into obsidian in order to pull off the color changing magic later on make sure to save your line work with a clear background and as a PNG file and actually if you want you can forget about saving all together if you just select the line work from your note you can actually just copy and paste it right into obsidian it just automatically saves it as an image in your Bol this makes it incredibly easy to get your diagrams right from editing into your notes and if you weren't aware if you follow the embedded file name with the pipe operator and then a number it will resize that image to the number of pixels and width very handy for keeping your notes looking authentic to themselves and readable as for any bod of text that's up to you I usually don't have anything crazier than headings lists and checkboxes in my notes but I'll touch on anything that's beyond markdown and into the realm of HTML a bit later on now this has been my favorite part of the whole project if it weren't for what you could pull off with CSS and your obsidian notes I likely wouldn't even be making this video by using the CSS classes property in the notes yaml front matter now also just know as properties we can add custom CSS theming on a per note basis I've gone ahead and developed a set of themes that I can mix and match to change the page color text color and even the pen color of our earlier scans you can find all of these over on my GitHub which I'll leave Linked In the description you could use these as your own themes or just as a jumping off point to create your own I highly recommend you mess around with these and get something that you feel matches the look and feel of your own notebooks to install the CSS snippet just download the file and in your obsidian settings go to appearance CSS Snippets and open the Snippets folder make sure to select the f and then back in obsidian hit the refresh button to make sure you enable The Notebook background snippet some of the CSS names might change a bit between recording and uploading this but I'll keep a full list of what's included on the GitHub page as I update it when recreating Pages for my notebooks I apply the class for this Manila background and then add a pen color class that matches the Real Page by default these classes just change the dominant text color leaving our drawings alone but if I add this recolor images class Boom the image now changes color to match the rest of the page and you can change the pen colors and Page colors to whatever you want all right there from obsidian in fact I even started playing around and adding themes to make make blueprints which I think go really well with any technical drawings seeing these sorts of pages alongside the rest of my regular notes is just the coolest thing lastly I'll go over a few edge cases and talk a little bit more about diagram searchability and OCR you may have noticed that a few of my notes use different pen colors on the same page I'm handling this a couple different ways for the diagrams I take care of this in the editing stage where I just kind of match color for what I know I want in the end unfortunately if I use the recolor images class with these they'll only ever be able to change to a single color this is actually why I made that class an optional optin choice in the first place for the multicolor text itself I'm wrapping the areas I want to change color in Span or div HTML tags with the pen color class applied it's not really a great solution but it at least makes it possible another drawback I using HTML tags like this is that you lose any markdown formatting in between them and you'll just have to create that format with HTML itself maybe it's just me who will go to these links but the option's there for you another catch you might have thought of is how these diagrams might look if embedded into other notes if you ever run into a situation where you might need to say use a black outline diagram and another note that has a black background what do you do unfortunately as of making this obsidian doesn't let you wrap embedded images inside of HTML tags they just revert back to plain text that loses us some customization but not all hope is lost I've also included a special CSS class that changes use the background color of all the embedded images on a page it's not a perfect solution but hey it might work for you in a pinch and really you could always just whip up a different version of your diagram and use that one for embedding wait why didn't I think of that earlier oh and if you're thinking about things like the CSS before and after selector yeah they kind of work but only in live preview mode and even then it just gets buggy as soon as the HTML tag goes out of frame just try and stick to one of the other methods one more thing to consider about your diagrams if you want any of the text in your imag to be searchable in your Vault you got a few options one is to use the Omni search and text extractor plugins which will use OCR to read the text and any images and PDFs you have in your Vault while this is pretty cool and useful in its own right OCR is kind of a no-o for those of us with bad handwriting a manual alternative to this could be transcribing the text yourself and then keeping it stored somewhere in the notes front matter this is personally what I would do if there's any handwritten text I know I wanted to search for a third option would be to use the excal plugin to transcribe your text with but I've had mixed results with this both with searchability outside the note and with embedded drawing quality on mobile well thanks for indulging me on this little side Excursion it's been one of those random little side projects that I wanted to share with anyone who might be interested I started this YouTube channel to share these random little creative deep Dives that pop up in my life so even if you're not so into whatever the subject of the videos are but you enjoy watching the process consider subscribing I've been Travis and happy not taking he