A couple of months ago I started using Obsidian on my work laptop, as a note taking application, a permanent clipboard, or to quickly write a prepared ‘daily’ for the stand up when I don’t want to leave out anything important that happened the day before.

Soon enough I installed it on my private laptop as well and started typing away. The third vault I created would became my xbrl-quickguide. Each chapter was a note, and soon enough I had a slew of tabs open, re-ordering them as a table of contents and in the meanwhile writing. Sometimes linear, sometimes more chapters at once. But when the end of the writing the first version came into sight I thought, “this all fine, but this is not presentable as a ‘guide’”. I need some tool to convert this markdown files into a pdf or an e-book.

The hunt was on, and there were some promising obsidian plugins, I choose the ‘controllable hard way’. Some queries pointed me towards Pandoc which could do a lot of things, but amongst them convert markdown into pdf and epub. Well, to be honest, Pandoc on it’s own cann’t do the pdf conversion, but if you install a latex, pandoc is your friend.

It started out simple, because al I needed at that time was something I could produce to get the whole thing in front of me, vertically (page by page), not horizontally with all the tabs in the right order.

The shell script was born. Which held the command to freshen the pdf. All the while my main focus was on the writing. Switching back and forth between the pdf, which i then used to proofread whole chapters, go back to Obsidian and recreate the pdf.

Come christmas holiday and it was time to do some serious layout work. Because Pandoc uses LaTeX for typesetting the pdf it was easy to find all sorts of templates. One that was mentioned often was Eisvogel. I downloaded it, hacked my beginner-way into some settings to get the results I wanted, so I probably did things the wrong way, but I learned a couple of things.

I’m still happy with the result, but I’m biased.

I’ve uploaded the whole guide to github: https://github.com/xiffy/xbrl-quickguide

The repository not only contains the Markdown files I wrote with Obsidian, I’ve also added the scripts and the edited Eisvogel template.

Those of you that know XBRL and find any errors in my guide are welcome to open an issue, an new release shall created upon merge.