nicolevdh
patreon
Organizing PDFs and talking to Sly Flourish
🕑 Added 2023-04-07 16:00:08 +0000 UTCSurely I'm not the only one who's struggled with how to organize and make sense of thousands of PDFs? Yeah, thousands. My TTRPG hobby makes it so that I literally have thousands of PDFs that are languishing in my Dropbox folder, and I've really been trying to find a way to actually make use of them. Good news: I've found a solution, and this week's video takes you through my research.
That research also means it's longer than normal, but I wanted to go through all the options I tried and list the reasons I discounted them so that you can check them out if my reasons or use cases don't match up with yours. Spoiler alert: the tool I've ended up using is Zotero-- but not for how it's mostly intended.
Note: This video will be unlisted until Friday, when I have to mark it as private shortly before it is published for everyone to see. If you try to watch it and get a "Private video" error, you've probably caught it in that small window. Wait a few hours and try again-- it will be published shortly.
Bonus: Patreon-exclusive video on Zotero
As long as the video was, there's more I want to say on the topic! Specifically, I'm working on another video that more completely shows the final result of all that research and tinkering. I made this video for Patreons only, as a sneak peek of where things are going-- I show a bit of my TTRPG PDF setup, but non-gamers may still benefit if they regularly work with PDFs.
Livestream: Lazy GM note taking with Sly Flourish
I'm thrilled and nervous to announce that I'm going to be interviewing Sly Flourish next Tuesday (follow that link to enable notifications for when we're live). Sly Flourish is a prolific author, GM, and all-around nice guy in the TTRPG community, and he's single-handedly changed a lot about the way I run and play RPGs-- and take notes for them.
We're going to talk about his "Lazy GM method" for note-taking, how I've adapted it for Obsidian, and how he uses it for his tool of choice (for now... I'm working on it!): Notion. We're going to be live at 7:30 PM EDT (01:30 CEST/23:30 UTC), so this livestream's particularly friendly time-wise for North Americans!
Vault changes
- nvdh-ttrpg-vault:
- In connection with next week's video, previewed above, I've added Table of Contents for several books from different TTRPG systems, each one with a clickable Zotero deep link that you can modify for your own purposes if you have the same PDFs.
- I also replaced some 5e monster files (for Asian Monsters, Creature Codex, Tome of Beasts 1-3) with files that include Zotero links and optional embedded pages via the Better PDF plugin. More explanation is coming soon on this process, but essentially this is a way to have every monster file have all the metadata, have a link to the page in the PDF, and an embed of the page from the PDF.
- I added two workflows (Using Table of Contents for sourcebooks and Using monster files) to describe how to use the new Table of Contents and monster files. - obsidian-playbook
I've been thinking about just opening this up to the public, rather than letting it only be accessed by Patreons, as it is now. My reasoning for this is that it's better to truly learn in public than to learn in semi-public. What do you all think? It would mean one fewer exclusive for Patreons, but unless there are objections, I think I want to do it anyway.
To access these vaults and more, check out this list of Patreon perks-- they'll always have the most updated links and passwords for the vaults.
Hey, thanks for all your support, this week and every week. Have a great one!
Comments
Risi Nyx
Hey there! Now that MCDM's Flee! mortals is out, I'd love to be able to add it somehow to my obsidian vault so I can actually use all the cool new stuff. Only thing is, I have no idea how. I think you've done videos that shows how you use zotero on a high level, but it would be immensely helpful to me if you did a step-by-step guide on how to set that up, in detail. Its all still confusing to me.
Nicole van der Hoeven
Hey Annie! I have not-- highlighting/annotating is not too big a deal for me, and neither are citations, so I didn't really look into solutions for those. :)
Annie
I use the Zotero Integration plugin for Obsidian to import notes from PDF stored in Zotero. Have you looked at it? Together with Citation, it makes referencing to Zotero pretty powerful, in my opinion.
