Take the Floor

Present a note as slides, with its links turned into real citations and your speaker notes on your own screen.

Works well with Due Credit, which exports a note to Word, PDF, Markdown or LaTeX with the same citations, and Paper Trail, which turns your Zotero library into a reading queue, with a note for each paper. See Works well with.

You wrote the talk in your vault, with your citations as links and your thoughts next to them. Then the conference asks for slides, and all of it gets typed again in another program, where [[marsh2024]] means nothing and the reference list is something you do by hand on the last evening.

Take the Floor shows the note itself. A line of --- starts a new slide, your %%comments%% are your speaker notes, and each citation shows its full reference at the foot of the slide. You press Present, the slides fill the other screen, and your notes stay on yours.

1 Installation

In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for "Take the Floor", and install and enable it. You can also find it on its page in the plugin directory.

Take the Floor needs Obsidian 1.13 or later, on desktop. Two things are optional:

• Pandoc makes the slides. If you have it installed, Take the Floor uses it. It needs pandoc 3.6.4 or later, and it's tested with 3.13. If you don't have it, Take the Floor offers to download pandoc for you the first time you present. This built-in pandoc is a 17 MB download that runs inside Obsidian.
• For citations, export a .bib file from Zotero with Better BibTeX's auto-export turned on, so it stays up to date as you add papers. Without one, links show as plain text.

2 Getting started

1. Write a talk. Any note works. Put a line of --- between slides, with a blank line above it:

   # Reading in public
   
   A claim about reading [[marsh2024]]. %%Say hello first.%%
   
   ---
   
   ## The second slide
   
   Words for the room. %%And something only you can see.%%
   

2. Look at it. Run Preview slides to see every slide in a tab, which updates when the note is saved.

3. Present it. Run Present. To have a button for it in the note's title bar, give the note the property presentation: true.

With a second screen, the slides fill it and your notes open in a pane next to your note. With one screen, the slides stay in a window, so you can rehearse. Before a talk, try it once on the computer you'll use, so that pandoc is there when the room has no internet.

3 Safety and quality

Take the Floor writes nothing in your vault. Presenting reads your note and shows it. The only file it writes for you is a PDF you ask for, in a place you pick outside the vault. Your speaker notes are taken out of the note before anything else happens, so they can't end up on a slide or in a PDF. Section 10 lists exactly what it reads and writes.

It only connects to the internet to download the built-in pandoc, when you have no pandoc installed and say yes, and to show what a slide has from the web, like an image. The programs it starts are an installed pandoc and, when you use the niri window manager, niri, to put the slides on the other screen.

The health report in Obsidian's plugin directory warns about two things. Both are part of how it works:

• Shell Execution is pandoc and niri. Take the Floor starts them directly, without a shell in between, and starts nothing else.
• Direct Filesystem Access is for what Obsidian can't do for a plugin. Take the Floor reads your bibliography and citation style wherever you keep them, and checks that the files in your settings exist. It puts the files pandoc needs in a temporary folder, keeps the built-in pandoc in your cache folder, and writes the PDF you asked for.

Every change is tested. Every release is built in public on GitHub, and you can check that the file you installed is the one GitHub built. Section 10.5 shows how.

Table of contents

• 4 Documentation
• 5 Features
• 6 How it works
• 7 Commands
• 8 Settings
• 9 Works well with
• 10 Network and file disclosure
• 11 Questions or issues?
• 12 Support
• 13 License

4 Documentation

If you want to work on the plugin:

• Architecture - How the code is layered, and what happens when you press Present.
• Settings - How settings are stored.
• Development - Setup, tests, and releases.
• Compatibility - What a release may and may not change, so your settings, hotkeys, notes and CSS snippets keep working.

5 Features

5.1 Writing a talk

• A talk is a normal note - It needs no special format, and it reads fine without the plugin. Due Credit can export it as it is.
• Speaker notes that stay yours - A %%comment%% on a slide is what you say over it.
• A preview as you write - Preview slides shows every slide, and marks one that's too long to fit.
• Your look - Slides follow your Obsidian theme, and your CSS snippets reach them. Section 6.3 has the names.

5.2 Citations

• Links are citations - [[marsh2024]] shows as "(Marsh 2024)", in the citation style you choose.
• The reference at the foot - Each slide has the full reference of what it cites, since nobody can turn back to an earlier slide. A closing slide lists them all.
• Before you start - A link that would come out as plain text is listed first.

5.3 During the talk

• Your notes on your screen - The pane shows the slide on the screen, the next one, a timer and your notes. A link in your notes opens that note, such as a paper during the questions.
• A clicker just works - Its keys change slides wherever your cursor is, and they never type into a note.
• Fix something in the middle - Hide the slides, edit your note, and watch the slide change in the pane. When you show them again, the room sees the new version.
• No lock screen - Your computer stays awake while the talk runs.
• A cable that comes out - The slides drop into a window so that they don't cover your notes, on the same slide, and go back when the screen does.

5.4 For after the talk

• A PDF - Export slides to PDF makes one with a slide to a page, without your notes. It needs no LaTeX, and it's also a good backup for a room where your laptop can't connect.

6 How it works

6.1 What happens to your note

Directly under a line of text, --- makes that line a heading, as it does in Obsidian, so it needs the blank line. Indented, or in a ::: block, it stays a line on the slide. At the very top of a note, it starts the note's properties.

A slide with too much on it is cut off at the bottom. The notes pane and the preview say which one it is.

6.2 Keys during a talk

While the slides are hidden, the keyboard is yours for editing. Esc, Page Up, Page Down or the eye button bring the slides back on the same slide, so a clicker does too. Other keys go to whatever has the cursor, and a dialog you open keeps its keys.

6.3 Changing how slides look

Slides follow your theme. To change them, add a CSS snippet with these names:

For example, to make your slides light on a dark theme, which is easier to read on many projectors, set your theme's colours for them:

.take-the-floor-stage {
  background: white;
  color: black;
  --text-normal: black;
  --text-muted: #444;
  --link-color: #0645ad;
  --link-external-color: #0645ad;
  --code-background: #eee;
  --h1-color: black;
  --h2-color: black;
  --h3-color: black;
  --blockquote-color: #333;
  --list-marker-color: #444;
}

A theme can have more colours of its own, so check a slide with everything on it in Preview slides. I tried this one on the Border theme, where inline code keeps its colour.

6.4 Getting to the other screen

• On niri, Windows, macOS and X11, the slides go to the other screen by themselves and fill it. With more than one other screen, it asks which. I test this on niri. I haven't tried it on a real second screen on the others yet.
• On other Wayland desktops, an app can't move its own window. Drag the slideshow to the other screen, and press F.
• With one screen, the slideshow is a normal window.

7 Commands

None of the commands come with a hotkey, so they won't clash with the ones you already use. You can set your own in Settings → Hotkeys.

• Take the Floor: Present - Shows the open note as slides. It's also on the ribbon and on a note's right-click menu.
• Take the Floor: Preview slides - Opens a tab with every slide of the open note.
• Take the Floor: Export slides to PDF - Makes a PDF, with a slide to a page. It's also on a note's right-click menu.

During a talk:

• Take the Floor: Next slide
• Take the Floor: Previous slide
• Take the Floor: Hide or show the slides
• Take the Floor: End presentation

8 Settings

Pandoc

Citations

9 Works well with

I made these too. Each one does one thing and works on its own, but they fit together nicely.

9.1 Due Credit

Due Credit exports a note to Word, PDF, Markdown or LaTeX. It reads a note the same way Take the Floor does, with the same code. Its Insert citation writes the links that Take the Floor shows as citations.

Give both plugins the same Bibliography and Citation style. Your talk and your chapter then cite the same way, and your comments stay behind in both.

9.2 Paper Trail

Paper Trail turns your Zotero library into a reading queue, with a note for each paper. With Better BibTeX, those notes have the citekey property, so a link to one of them cites that paper on your slide.

9.3 Loose Ends

Loose Ends makes new notes from templates. A template with presentation: true in its properties gives every new talk its Present button.

10 Network and file disclosure

Take the Floor runs entirely on your computer, and doesn't send anything of yours anywhere. It connects to the internet for two things:

• The built-in pandoc: When you have no pandoc installed and agree to download it, it gets pandoc-3.13-wasm.zip from pandoc's release on GitHub. Before keeping it, Take the Floor checks that the download is exactly the file it was tested with, by comparing its SHA-256 hash, a fingerprint of the file's contents.
• Something from the web on a slide: With ![](https://…/figure.png) in your note, the slideshow window loads it from that site, as any web page would, and the same goes for a video, an embedded page or a style in HTML you wrote in your note. That site can see your address. A talk's images load when it starts, to measure the slides, and when you preview or export. Images in your vault stay on your computer.

10.1 What it reads

• Notes: The note you present, preview or export, as far as you've typed it. Also the citation keys of the notes it links to, and the images it shows.
• Bibliography: The .bib file you set in Bibliography.
• Citation style: From Zotero's styles folder (~/Zotero/styles), or the .csl file you set.
• Obsidian's settings: Whether strict line breaks are on, from the vault's app.json.
• The settings tab: The path and properties of every note, while it's open, to say when your Papers folder has no notes or no note has your Citation key property.
• Open notes: The properties of each open note, to see whether it has presentation: true.
• Your screens: The screens Obsidian can see, when you press Present and when one comes or goes.
• On niri: The list of screens, workspaces and windows, with each window's title, of all your apps, to find the slideshow and the screen it goes to. Nothing keeps them.
• Your PATH: each folder on it, for a pandoc installed there.
• The built-in pandoc: pandoc-3.13.wasm in your cache folder, when there's no pandoc installed. Once a session, Take the Floor checks its hash to make sure the file hasn't changed. A file that doesn't match is deleted, and downloaded again if you agree.

10.2 What it writes

Take the Floor writes nothing in your vault, apart from its settings.

• The PDF: Only the file you pick in the save dialog, never inside your vault.
• The built-in pandoc: when you agree to download it, pandoc-3.13.wasm in your user cache folder, outside the vault. The 17 MB download unpacks to this 62 MB file. It goes in ~/.cache/obsidian-citation-core on Linux (or in $XDG_CACHE_HOME), ~/Library/Caches/obsidian-citation-core on macOS, and obsidian-citation-core\Cache in %LOCALAPPDATA% on Windows. If you also use Due Credit or In the Open, they use the same file. You can delete it. It's downloaded again, if you agree, the next time it's needed.
• Temporary files: Each time it makes slides, the files that come with it (pandoc's filters, a template and a font), the note's properties and pandoc's result go in a temporary folder. With the built-in pandoc, the note's text goes in a second one. Both are removed afterwards.

10.3 What it stores

• Settings: Its own data.json in the plugin folder.
• Your layout: Obsidian saves its open windows in the vault's workspace.json, the slideshow and the notes pane too. They close at the next start, and they hold no slides or notes.

10.4 What it runs

• Pandoc: The one you set in Pandoc. Take the Floor first asks it its version (pandoc --version). An installed pandoc can read and write anything you can.
• The built-in pandoc, when there's no pandoc installed. It runs inside Obsidian, and Take the Floor only gives it your vault, the folders of the files in your settings, and its temporary folders. Node, which runs it inside Obsidian, doesn't guarantee that a program can't get past those folders, for example through a link in your vault to a folder outside it. So don't rely on those folders to keep a file private from it.
• Niri: niri msg, only when niri is running, to read the lists above, move the slideshow to the other screen and give the focus back to Obsidian.

Nothing else runs. While a talk runs, it also asks your system to keep the screen awake, and it stops asking when the talk ends.

10.5 How releases are built

Every change I push is built, checked with ESLint and the official Obsidian ESLint plugin, and tested with Vitest. Nix builds it a second time, on its own.

Releases are built by GitHub Actions from the tagged code, after the same checks. A release only goes out when its tag matches the version in manifest.json, and every action it uses is pinned to an exact version. Each release comes with a signed attestation from GitHub, which records what it was built from. To check that the main.js you installed is the one GitHub built:

gh attestation verify main.js --repo jorritvanderheide/obsidian-take-the-floor

The citation tests run through a real pandoc, always the same version, in obsidian-citation-core, which holds the citation code. A release only uses a version of it that passed them, so a change in pandoc's output shows up as a failing test before it reaches you.

11 Questions or issues?

Have a look at the FAQ first. It covers the things people run into most, like a slideshow that stays on the wrong screen. If something still doesn't work, or you have an idea, please open an issue. Found a security problem? Please report it privately, the way the security policy explains.

The code lives on Codeberg, with a copy on GitHub.

12 Support

Take the Floor is free. If it's useful to you and you'd like to give something back, you can do that on Liberapay:

13 License

Copyright © 2026 Jorrit van der Heide. Licensed under the EUPL-1.2. Open Sans, from fonts/ in obsidian-citation-core, is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.