PDFium Gate 0.1.224 - permanent product identity transition to pdfium-gate; runtime features unchanged.
PDFium Gate is an experimental desktop plugin for Obsidian that explores a more capable, source-oriented workflow for PDF documents.
The project is built around a simple idea: a PDF should remain a durable source document, while Obsidian should provide the surrounding workspace for reading, highlighting, linking, structured metadata, document registers, notes, and long-term analysis.
[!WARNING] This is pre-release software. It is still under active development and has not yet completed broad platform and real-world testing. Make a complete backup of your Obsidian Vault before installing or updating the plugin, especially if the Vault contains important or irreplaceable material.
PDFs are central to journalism, research, public-record work, investigations, administration, and archival projects. A useful long-term workflow needs more than a PDF viewer: it should make it easy to preserve the source, extract and cite evidence, organize documents, add structured information, and return to the exact place where a finding came from.
PDFium Gate aims to keep that work inside one Obsidian interface while avoiding unnecessary lock-in. Important metadata is stored as ordinary Markdown/YAML rather than in a proprietary plugin database, and the original PDF remains the primary source document.
The project is guided by a few principles:
The current test builds include:
The complete UI currently supports:
English is the canonical fallback language. When Auto is selected, the plugin follows a supported Obsidian UI language and falls back to English for unsupported languages.
UI language is separate from regional date, time, and decimal formatting. Changing the UI language does not translate or rewrite user-owned metadata labels or category names.
Most open UI surfaces change language immediately. Command Palette display names are the known exception and refresh after the plugin is reloaded or Obsidian is restarted.
Do not test a pre-release build against the only copy of important data.
Recommended minimum procedure:
.obsidian folder.The plugin's automatic PDF-backup feature is an additional safeguard for PDF modifications. It is not a replacement for a full Vault backup. The plugin also creates and updates metadata/configuration files and plugin settings during normal use.
PDFium Gate is distributed through Obsidian Community Plugins.
Updates are delivered through Obsidian's normal Community Plugins update mechanism.
isDesktopOnly: true).The project deliberately separates durable user data from disposable acceleration data and internal configuration.
File Metadata/ contains ordinary indexed Markdown/YAML document records..pdf-metadata/ contains plugin metadata/configuration and disposable technical data such as the document-record index cache and the example-bootstrap marker.PDF Dokumentregister.base is created on demand as the standard document register. After creation it is treated as user-owned and is not silently overwritten by the plugin.Examples-Obsidian-PDFium-Gate/ contains a one-time copied example set. These files are user-owned after creation and are never overwritten by the plugin.The exact internal structures may still evolve before the project reaches a stable 1.0 release. Changes to persisted formats or file layouts require an explicit migration/backward-compatibility review before a public stable release.
This project should currently be treated as a serious test build rather than finished production software.
Known boundaries include:
If you find a reproducible problem, please open a GitHub Issue and include the Obsidian version, operating system, plugin version, what you expected, what happened, and any relevant diagnostics.
Historical documents are retained because they explain why several architectural and UX decisions were made. They may describe experiments or policies that were later superseded; current architecture documents and source verification are authoritative.
The root runtime is generated from canonical sources under src/.
Run the complete verification pipeline with:
npm run check
The pipeline builds the runtime and checks internationalization, migrated UI text, architecture documentation integrity, deterministic build output, dependency boundaries, shared-state ownership, metadata contracts, and other regression gates.
Generated root runtime files are committed so GitHub releases can provide the files used by Obsidian Community Plugins.
The current 0.1.x series is the development/test line. The planned public maturity sequence is:
0.9.x — Beta0.99.x — Release Candidate1.0.0 — stable releaseThe project is intentionally conservative about data ownership and migration as it approaches those milestones.
Testing, bug reports, translation improvements, and focused pull requests are welcome while the project matures. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting code or larger documentation changes. Translation contributors should also read TRANSLATING.md; architecture contributors should start with ARCHITECTURE.md.
PDFium Gate is released under the MIT License.