Word Exporter

Export Obsidian notes to Word (.docx) that look like Obsidian's own PDF export: same fonts, sizes, colors, spacing, callouts, code highlighting and page setup, as editable Word content.

Using it

• Command palette: Export current note to Word (.docx)
• File menu: right-click a note → Export to Word (.docx)

By default the export uses the page size, margins, title and scale last chosen in Obsidian's Export to PDF dialog, so the two exports match. You can set them separately in the plugin settings instead.

What carries over

Styling comes from your theme and CSS snippets the way PDF export applies them, including their @media print and @page rules.

How it works

1. Render the note offscreen with Obsidian's own renderer, in the same DOM shape and stylesheet environment as PDF export's print window: light theme, print rules, the print window's root font size, laid out at the page's text width.
2. Walk the rendered DOM and read computed styles and layout positions into an intermediate model (src/ir.ts). Vertical spacing is measured from the layout itself, so collapsed margins and theme quirks come out right.
3. Emit the model as .docx with docx, translating CSS line boxes into Word's line spacing using each font's own metrics, read from the installed font files.

Known differences from PDF export

• Footnotes are Word footnotes at the bottom of each page rather than a list at the end, so page breaks can fall differently.
• Word can't round corners of boxes or draw custom checkbox shapes; checkboxes use box glyphs in the theme's colors.
• Text inside Mermaid diagrams is part of a picture.
• Where the browser splits a callout across pages, Word may move it whole to the next page.

Access outside the vault

The plugin is desktop only. It reads and writes vault files through Obsidian's vault API, and goes outside the vault in exactly two cases:

• Saving with Ask where to save: the export is written to the file you pick in the system save dialog, which may be outside the vault. The other save locations write inside the vault.
• Reading installed fonts: to match Word's line heights, the plugin reads font files (read-only) from the system font folders, such as /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts on macOS, C:\Windows\Fonts on Windows, and /usr/share/fonts and ~/.fonts on Linux. Nothing is written there.

The plugin makes no network requests other than fetching remote images that your notes already embed.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # rebuild main.js on change
npm run build   # typecheck and production build
npm test        # unit tests
npm run lint

test-vault/ is a vault for trying the plugin: its .obsidian/plugins/word-exporter links to the build output.

Comparing against PDF export (macOS)

The scripts in scripts/ drive a running Obsidian over the Chrome DevTools Protocol, export a note both ways, convert the .docx with Microsoft Word, and compare the results:

# Start Obsidian with DevTools listening on localhost only:
open -a Obsidian --args --remote-debugging-port=9222 --remote-debugging-address=127.0.0.1

scripts/cycle.sh "Kitchen Sink.md"            # side-by-side page images in test-output/
python3 scripts/linediff.py "test-output/Kitchen Sink"   # per-line position deltas
python3 scripts/steps.py "test-output/Kitchen Sink" --worst 10
scripts/regress.sh                            # every fixture, default and custom theme

Needs Microsoft Word and pdftoppm/pdftotext (poppler).