Book Exporter

Write a book inside an Obsidian vault — one manifest note lists the table of contents, each chapter and section is its own note. The plugin compiles the structure into a single manuscript and exports to EPUB and PDF via Pandoc.

Desktop only. Requires pandoc on $PATH — or set the path in settings. For PDF, Typst is the recommended engine: a single small binary with output quality close to LaTeX.

Key features

• One note = one book. The manifest note holds the metadata and the table of contents through wikilinks. Chapters and sections live in their own notes.
• No required tag, folder or filename. Any Markdown note can be used as a manifest.
• EPUB and PDF. Configurable PDF engine (Typst by default; xelatex / tectonic / weasyprint / wkhtmltopdf available).
• Validation before export. Missing chapters, broken wikilinks, and missing required metadata are surfaced with a clear report — no half-baked exports.
• Per-book overrides. A book_export: block in the manifest’s frontmatter overrides plugin-level defaults (output folder, PDF engine, formats, TOC depth, page-break behaviour, extra Pandoc flags).
• Manuscript preview. A dedicated command writes the compiled .md and opens it — useful for checking what Pandoc will see.

Why Pandoc?

Pandoc is the industry-standard document converter. There is no production-ready library port for JavaScript / Node, and bundling Pandoc itself is impractical (multi-platform binary, hundreds of MB). The plugin treats Pandoc as a hard prerequisite — that’s the price for high-quality output. Install once, export forever.

Quick start

1. Install the plugin (manual install or via BRAT).
2. Install Pandoc. For PDF, install Typst (recommended).
3. Open any Markdown note and structure it as a manifest (see Usage).
4. From the command palette, run Book Exporter: Export current book to EPUB (or PDF / all formats).

About

Created by Sébastien Dubois. Source code, issues and roadmap on GitHub.

If this plugin helps you ship a book, buy me a coffee ☕.