Customizing Templates

You can access the template settings by navigating to Settings Tab > Template in Obsidian. There are two types of templates you can work with:

1. Simple templates: These can be edited directly in the settings tab.
2. Advanced templates (Ejectable): These are saved as markdown template files and need to be ejected into the template folder for further editing.

For our templates, we use the eta (opens in a new tab) template engine, similar to the engine that powers the Templater (opens in a new tab) plugin.

Edit Simple Template

For the sake of simplicity, let's start with a simple template. As an example, if you want to include only the title in the note filename, you can replace the default template with the following and press Apply Button:

<%= it.title %>.md

Edit Complex Template

For more complex customization like note content, you'll need to work with the markdown template files, which cannot be edit before being ejected into the template folder.

Use Live Template Editor

To make the template editing process easier, we provide a live template editor. You have just open it in the previous step. The live template editor is a split view with the template file editor on the left and the previews on the right.

The preview are blank if you haven't selected any item. To select an item:

Open Annotaion Panel in Obsidian

We'll discuss the usage of annotation panel in details later, for now, we only need it to select an item for preview.

1. Open command palette
2. Select Open Zotero Annotation View in Side Panel command

You should see the annotation panel opened on the right side of the screen.

Pick a literature to preview

1. Click on Choose Follow Mode Button
2. Select Link with Selected Literature option
3. Select a literature in the popup searchbox

You should see the preview updated with the selected literature.

Preview item details

Click on Show Details button at the top left, you should see the details of the selected literature opened in the editor.

The full template editor looks like this:

In the template editor, you can:

• Edit the template file on the left
• Preview the template in the middle with data from selected item
• View all the available data of the selected item on the right

We'll show you how to make use of all these features in the following sections.

Customize Each Template

Setup Note Properties Template

Let's start with the Note Properties template. By default it looks like this:

title: "<%= it.title %>"
citekey: "<%= it.citekey %>"

This is a YAML (opens in a new tab) template. It's used to set the frontmatter (opens in a new tab) of the note. You can add any frontmatter you want in this template.

For example, if you want to add the tags field to the frontmatter, you can add the following line to the template:

tags: [<%= it.tags %>]

In this example, we warp the tags field with [] to make sure tag containing space characters like my tag are parsed properly. If your tags may contain special characters like [] or , mentioned before, you can use JSON.stringify to escape them:

tags: <%= JSON.stringify(it.tags) %>

For more examples of Note Property Template, please refer to How-to section.

---
raw: true
---

Update Note Content Template

The default template looks like this:

# <%= it.title %>

[Zotero](<%= it.backlink %>) <%= it.fileLink %>
<%~ include("annots", it.annotations) %>

Saying that we want to include the abstract of the literature in the note content. If you have opened the template editor with a literature selected, you should see the abstractNote in the item details preview, like the following. You can right-click on the abstractNote and select Copy Template (Pick first element) to copy the template code to the clipboard.

Now you have <%= it.abstractNote.first() %> copied into your clipboard. Paste the template code to the template file editor to anywhere you want, and you should see the template preview updated with the abstract.

Update Template for Each Annotation

Assuming that the literature you selected has annotations, you should see the annotation panel filled with the annotations like so:

You can click on the Show Details button on the header of each annotation to preview with that annotation.

The default template for each annotation looks like this:

[!note] Page <%= it.pageLabel %>

<%= it.imgEmbed %><%= it.text %>
<% if (it.comment) { %>
---
<%= it.comment %>
<% } %>

By default, the annotations are rendered as Callouts (opens in a new tab) with block ID, so that they can be tracked by the plugin for future updates:

> [!note] Page 1
> ![](image-excerpt.png)Some Excerpt
>
> ---
>
> This is a comment
> ^LUE86KQFaF39HNRLZp2

Suppose you want to add color as callout type instead of "note", you can find two variable about color in the annotation: color and colorName. Here we use colorName, which is human-readable color name instead of color code. Right-click on the abstractNote and select Copy Template.

Paste it into [!note] to replace it. Your template should look like this:

[!<%= it.colorName %>] Page <%= it.pageLabel %>
...

You should see the preview updated with the color name.

In addition, if you want to add the title of the literature to the annotation, you can't find it in the annotation details. This is because those info about parent literature are stored in it.docItem. So to add the title, you can use <%= it.docItem.title %> in the annotation template.

💡

If you want to check the details of the parent literature, you can use the switch buttons in the header of template preview panel. In this case, you can click on Open Note Template button to switch to the parent literature to see details.

Template for Batch Importing Annotations

You may notice the <%~ include("annots", it.annotations) %> in the Note Content template. This is a special syntax to include another template. In this case, it's the template for batch importing annotations, named annots.

First, let's click on Open Template for Annotations Button to open the template editor for annotations.

The default template for annotations looks like this:

<% for (const annotation of it) { %>
<%~ include("annotation", annotation) %>
<% } %>

This is a loop template. It loops through all the annotations and pass each annotation to the annotation template. The annotation template is the template we just edited in the previous section.

Now, let's say we want to add a divider between each annotation. We can add a divider in the annots template:

<% for (const annotation of it) { %>
<%~ include("annotation", annotation) %>

---
<% } %>

You should see the divider added between each annotation in the preview.

That's all about customizing templates in Obsidian-Zotero. In the next section, we will delve into how you can keep your literature notes up-to-date with the latest changes in Zotero.

List of Partial templates