Background
I’m new to Obsidian, so I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos trying to see how others use it and collecting ideas for my own use. I recently came across CyanVoxel’s video BEST of BOTH Worlds? Digitizing Field Notes inside Obsidian and the thumbnail showcasing a notebook page digitized for Obsidian immediately caught my eye.The tutorial demonstrates how this user backs up his physical handwritten notes and incorporates them into his Obsidian notes in a way that allows him to preserve the feel of the original notes while also making them adaptable to themes. It’s definitely extra, but so am I and I really wanted to learn how to make my notes look seamless and cohesive. I wasn’t put off by the comments saying it was too much effort. How hard could it be?
Then I saw him open up Affinity Photo and I thought absolutely the fuck not. I know how painstaking it can be to clean up a scan in software like this or Photoshop. I decided I would have to settle for practical but obtrusive scans and accept that my notes were doomed to be ugly.
Today, however, I remembered that I am a vector artist.
I, unfortunately, am an Adobe hoe shelling out my monthly subscription until I die because I really do love the workflows and tools available in Illustrator, but I wanted to see if I could use free software, like Inkscape, to make this process a bit less tedious because I know the average person should not justify an Adobe subscription.
Turns out it was incredibly easy so I felt it was my duty to introduce non-vector artists to the power of vector software and stress that it does not have to be intimidating or inaccessible.
Brief note:
Raster graphics are pixel based and will distort if you resize them. Most image files you deal with are rasters. Vector graphics are point based and infinitely scalable and include SVGs, DXFs, EPSs and more. You can export them as raster graphics for more common applications, but can always return to the vector to edit or scale if necessary.Tutorial
So here is what I did:After scanning and cropping an old notebook (it’s been a while since I’ve used physical notebooks because digitizing them has been a pain in the past) this is what I got:
Cleaning this up in raster software would require repeated use of the magic wand tool and eraser. I would have to zoom in, pan around, and make sure I got everything I didn’t want to include.
In Inkscape, which I do not really know how to use because, again, I’m an Adobe hoe, I opened up the file and went to Path>Trace Bitmap, which opened up a tracing tool in the side panel.
If you’re familiar with my work, you know I don’t bother with tracing vectors in multiple colors because the results are always difficult to work with. I am going to trace this as a black and white image and then if I want to edit specific paths to change their colors, I can do that afterward fairly easily.
With detection mode set to Brightness Cutoff and the Live Updates checkbox selected, all I really have to do is click on the image and adjust threshold until the preview thumbnail looks right. It will select anything that is darker than the threshold, so the page background will automatically be excluded. If you use a different detection mode, this will most likely not be the case.
I just move the threshold slider until I find a sweet spot. If it’s too low, parts of notes might not be picked up or the writing will look very thin. If it’s too high, faint shadows, gridlines, and ghosting will be selected. In this case, the sweet spot was about 0.699 (nice!). See below for examples of thresholds that are too low or too high.
Once I find the sweet spot, I click Apply and my new vector graphic will appear above the raster image. To isolate the vector, I just go to the layers panel (the tab in the side panel that looks like three parallelograms) and toggle visibility of the image by clicking the eye icon next to image1. The eye will close and the raster image will no longer be visible.
Chances are, there will still be some stray areas that got picked up that I don’t want to include in my image. In this case, you can see a shadow from the scanning bed in the top left corner. In a raster program, I would use an eraser tool to get rid of this. In vector programs, I can use the direct selection tool that targets individual points that make up a vector path (in Inkscape this is called the Node tool).
With this tool selected, I can rubberband select the points I want to remove and hit delete. So easy. To see the results, I can go back to the Select tool (the one that looks like a regular cursor). A little tip here is that if you select the path with this tool, it will show a border around all the points or nodes that make up that path, so if you see the border goes further than your writing, you know there are some stray points/nodes that you can remove.
At this point, I can save my vector graphic and export it as a transparent PNG for whatever I want. Alternatively, I can select the vector path and copy and paste it directly into Obsidian and it will automatically convert it to a transparent PNG like so:
Now you are free to apply CyanVoxel’s technique to make it look like a more cohesive addition to your notes.
I realize this still seems a bit complex and long, but I was explaining for people who are unfamiliar with vector graphics. In reality, it took less than five minutes from scanning to final product. For a quick reference guide on the same process, see below
tl;dr
1. Scan notebook, preferably at least at 600 dpi and crop if necessary2. Open in Inkscape
3. In the Path menu, select Trace Bitmap
4. Under Single Scan, set detection mode to Brightness Cutoff and make sure Live Updates is checked
5. Adjust threshold until the preview is to your liking
6. Click Apply
7. In the Layers panel, toggle visibility of the original Image layer
8. Use the node tool (direct selection tool) if manual cleanup is necessary
9. Save and export
Resources
CyanVoxel BEST of BOTH Worlds? Digitizing Field Notes inside Obsidianhttps://youtu.be/9T9VL8_i1Tg?si=hggF5dHbeTvhttKR
Inkscape
https://inkscape.org/