Player Facing Notes

Player Facing Notes

Selectively publish parts of your notes. Flag blocks of any note as player-facing (public), then sync them into publish-ready copies for Obsidian Publish — the rest of the note never leaves your vault.

Built for Dungeon Masters who keep campaign notes and player handouts in one place, but just as useful for anyone publishing from a working vault: public docs with private margin notes, blog drafts with internal comments, shared team notes with personal context.

How it works

1. Flag content. Four ways, no syntax to remember:

   • Whole note — add the pfn property (checkbox) at the top of the note, or run Toggle player-facing for entire note. Everything after the frontmatter publishes; the editor tints the whole note to show it.
   • Gutter eyes — hover the left gutter: a closed eye appears at each block. Click it and the whole block (paragraph, callout, code fence, heading) becomes player-facing; the eye opens and stays cyan. Click an open eye to revoke.
   • Right-click — Show block/selection to players or Hide from players.
   • Command palette — Toggle player-facing on selection or block (assignable to a hotkey).

   Under the hood the plugin wraps content in lightweight markers:

   ::pf
   > [!quote] The note reads
   > Dear Friends, my name is Azumi...
   ::/pf
   

   Markers are standalone lines, so they wrap anything — callouts, nested callouts, tables, code blocks. They also work inside a callout (> ::pf) to flag part of one.

2. Markers stay invisible. In Live Preview they render as small "player-facing" pills with a tinted left border on the region (Realm Works style). In Reading view they're stripped entirely. Only Source mode shows raw markers.

3. Sync. Run Sync all player copies (ribbon eye icon or command palette). For each note with flagged content, the plugin writes a clean copy — flagged blocks only, markers stripped, publish: true — into a mirror folder (default _player/), preserving your folder structure. Stale copies are pruned automatically. Optional auto-sync on save in settings.

4. Publish. In Obsidian Publish, publish only the _player/ folder. Your master notes keep publish: false (or simply never get selected). Because filtering happens before upload, players cannot recover DM text from page source — unlike CSS/publish.js hiding, which only hides content client-side.

Rearranging the player folder

Player copies are tracked by the pfn-source property in their frontmatter, not by their path. Move or rename copies anywhere inside the player folder — build whatever structure your players should see — and future syncs update them in place. New copies start at the mirrored location; after that, layout is yours.

• Frontmatter you add to a copy (aliases, cssclasses, banners, ...) survives syncs; only publish and pfn-source are managed.
• Notes you create inside the player folder without pfn-source are never touched or pruned — handy for player-only index pages.
• Moving or renaming a source note updates its copy's pfn-source automatically, so your layout survives vault reorganizations.
• Wikilinks in copies always point at the copy's current location.
• Rename copies with Obsidian's normal rename (click the title or F2). The pfn-source property is the sync connection, so the new name sticks — and links in other player notes display the copy's player-facing name, never the original DM-side note name (unless you wrote an explicit alias).

Link handling

Inside player copies, wikilinks are rewritten:

• Link to a note that has player content → rewritten to its _player/ copy (display text preserved, #heading anchors kept).
• Link to a DM-only note → flattened to plain text, so the link target's existence doesn't leak.
• Attachments and unresolved links → left untouched (remember to also publish referenced images).

Settings

• Marker token — default pf; markers are ::pf / ::/pf.
• Output folder — default _player.
• Auto-sync on save — regenerate a note's player copy on every change.

Tips

• When flagging part of a callout, include the callout title line (> [!note] ...) in the region so it renders as a callout for players.
• A pfn-source frontmatter key in each player copy points back at the original note.
• An unclosed ::pf flags everything to the end of the note.

Development

npm install
npm run build    # production build -> main.js
npm run dev      # watch mode
npm test         # parser unit tests

Install by copying manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/player-facing-notes/.