Embed Google Docs

An Obsidian plugin that shows live Google Docs, Sheets and Slides inside a note. Paste a sharing link as an embed:

![[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AbC.../edit?usp=sharing]]

The document opens in place, fully interactive (scroll, read, edit, comment), using the Google account you sign in with. Desktop only.

Size and resizing

Drag the bar under an embed to change its height, or the corner to change width and height. The new size is written into the link:

Link	Size
![[link]]	full width, default height
![[link|600]]	full width, 600 px tall
![[link|800x600]]	800 px wide, 600 px tall

A single number is the height (unlike images, where it is the width), since documents fill the note's width. Dragging the corner back to full width drops the width again.

Signing in

Run Embed Google Docs: Sign in to Google from the command palette, or use the Sign in button in the plugin settings, and log in as you would in a browser. All embeds share that session, and it persists across restarts. The Sign in button Google shows inside an embed works too.

Obsidian's own web viewer cannot sign in to Google: Obsidian rewrites the sign-in request headers on the sessions it creates, and Google rejects them. This plugin keeps its embeds on a separate session (persist:embed-google-docs) that Obsidian leaves alone, and sends Chrome's user agent. If Google ever refuses the sign-in ("This browser or app may not be secure"), set a different user agent in the settings, for example a current Firefox one.

Settings

• Embed mode: the full editor, the editor without menus and toolbar, or a read-only preview.
• Default height: for links without a size.
• User agent: leave empty unless sign-in fails.

Behavior worth knowing

• Each embed is a full browser page. Embeds load only when they scroll into view, and Obsidian unloads them again when they scroll far away, so they reload when you come back.
• In live preview, the link text shows while the cursor is on it, like Obsidian's own embeds. The </> button in the embed's header jumps there.
• Resizing in reading view rewrites the note, which re-renders and reloads the embed. Resizing in live preview does not reload it.
• Links clicked inside a document open the way Obsidian opens external links.
• Embeds inside code blocks are left as text.

Network use and accounts

• Google account: viewing private documents and editing need a Google account. Public documents open without one.
• Network: embeds and the sign-in window load pages from Google (docs.google.com, accounts.google.com and whatever those pages load). The plugin contacts no other service, collects no data and sends nothing anywhere itself.
• Session data: the Google sign-in cookies are stored by Obsidian's Electron runtime in the persist:embed-google-docs session, outside your vault. Sign out of Google clears the login.

Install

In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Embed Google Docs, then install and enable it.

To install by hand, download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/embed-google-docs/, then enable Embed Google Docs under Settings → Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # or `npm run dev` to rebuild on every change

To release, set the new version in manifest.json and package.json, commit, and push a tag with that version (git tag 0.1.2 && git push origin 0.1.2). GitHub Actions builds the plugin, attests the files and publishes the release.

License

MIT