VaultPress

Export Obsidian-style Markdown notes to high-quality PDFs

VaultPress is an Obsidian-aware Markdown to PDF exporter for note-heavy documents, research notes, embeds, callouts, equations, and mixed Chinese/English technical writing.

It is built for people whose Markdown actually looks like Obsidian notes. It is not trying to be the most generic Markdown-to-PDF CLI.

At a glance

VaultPress is for:

• Obsidian-style notes with [[wikilink]], embeds, callouts, footnotes, math, and mixed technical writing
• people who care more about note export quality than generic Markdown feature breadth
• browser-quality PDF export with practical debugging hooks

VaultPress is not for:

• full Obsidian theme/plugin fidelity
• arbitrary browser automation workflows
• being the broadest general-purpose Markdown PDF product

Compared with a generic Markdown-to-PDF tool, VaultPress is already strong at:

• Obsidian-specific syntax
• note embeds and callouts
• page breaks and PDF headers/footers
• Chinese technical notes and research-style layouts
• browser-print output tuned around real reading notes

Quick Start

Install globally:

npm install -g vaultpress

Export one note:

vp -o out.pdf path/to/note.md

If you are working from a cloned repository instead:

bin/vaultpress --output out.pdf path/to/note.md

Documentation

• Getting started
• CLI reference
• Frontmatter config
• Features and examples
• Troubleshooting

Repository layout

• bin/ — CLI entrypoints
• lib/ — implementation scripts and render pipeline modules
• test/ — regression tests
• docs/obsidian-export-pdf/ — internal design notes and readiness checklist
• docs/getting-started.md — installation and first-run guide
• docs/cli.md — CLI options and path behavior
• docs/frontmatter.md — frontmatter, page breaks, headers and footers
• docs/features.md — feature overview and example showcase
• docs/troubleshooting.md — debugging and failure handling
• examples/ — example notes and comparison notes
• examples/screenshots/ — generated showcase screenshots

Known limitations

Current limitations worth being explicit about:

• not a full Obsidian renderer
• Dataview / DataviewJS blocks are displayed, not executed
• plugin compatibility is intentionally limited
• custom themes and full Obsidian styling are not reproduced 1:1
• current PDF backend depends on a locally installed Chromium-family browser
• browser auto-detection is pragmatic, not exhaustive

What still needs work

Before a clean public release, the biggest gaps are still:

• broader browser/platform support

Roadmap (near-term)

Near-term priorities:

1. broader browser/platform support

License

MIT