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.
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
Install globally:
npm install -g vaultpress vp --version vp --help
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
Contributor-facing material lives in docs/, test/, and the repository source tree.
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
Before a clean public release, the biggest gaps are still:
- broader browser/platform support
Near-term priorities:
- broader browser/platform support
MIT