Better Paste (Plugin for Obsidian)

Github: Repo

Context

I've been taking notes in Obsidian for the past six months and it's been working great. However, when I'm reading a paper, I'll often have it open as a PDF side-by-side with my notes. Everything is smooth until I want to copy a couple sentences form the PDF

and all of a sud-

-den, my formatting is all over the place. There's newlines and blank lines, and hyphens all over the place. Now I'm out of the zone and I have to go back and trim out all the strange gaps that have been introduced into my notes.

To fix this, I built this plugin which adds a 'clean paste' command. It allows me to easily paste in a couple clean lines with CMD + SHIFT + V.

Using the Obsidian sample plugin template, it was quick to put together the plugin. Switching back to TypeScript out of Python mode was surprisingly smooth using Copilot and Claude.

The plugin is pending approval to be listed in the Obsidian community plugins, I'll be curious to see if others find it useful.

I may look at adding some functionality for parsing Math from PDFs into LaTeX, another speedbump in my notetaking process. However, after 30min of research it seems like the world of math in PDFs is unstandardized and messy, not as quick as filtering out some newlines.