Is Obsidian a good tool to use for writing technical manuals? I would like to write an Operation Manual for municipality’s water system. There will be embedded screenshots and some links to other sections of the document.
Ideally we could “publish” to offline html. The customer would also like a printed manual.
If Obsidian is no good, I would love suggestions on software you have used to write short manuals with pictures, preferably not Word.
Check if makrdown formatting functionality is enough for you or not - it is pretty limited.
Do not forget to purchase proper obsidian license - your usecase is not covered by a free version.
Do not forget to purchase proper obsidian license - your usecase is not covered by a free version.
Can you elaborate on this? Are you referencing their “Publish” feature?
No. I mean the following: "Commercial Use Licenses are required whenever Obsidian is being used for work for a business with two or more personnel. Sole proprietorships or other one-person organizations do not require a Commercial Use License. Work for educational purposes does not require a Commercial Use License.
Commercial Use Licenses must be purchased on an annual and per user basis. Commercial users must purchase at least as many licenses as the number of people who will be using Obsidian.
You may use Obsidian commercially for free for 14 days to evaluate the app before purchase."
Hm. I keep notes in Obsidian, including work notes. I wonder if that violates the license. I might abandon Obsidian over this.
including work notes
This requires a commercial license. If your work does not meet few exceptions mentioned in the text I quoted above.
Sorry for bad news …
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I also see the definition of “work use” rather fuzzy. I have discussed this on Reddit some time ago. And conclusion was: if it is somehow work related you need a license, does matter if you share your voult or on not.
Practically, obsidian does not hunt for people who use the soft without a proper license.
On the other hand obsidian is developed by 2 people, I believe 3 now.
Btw, your employer most probably will disagree with your definition of personal notes as well and the fact that you install obsidian on a work hardware.
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‘what constitutes work use
It’s Commercial Use as opposed to Private Use.
“Commercial use describes any activity in which you use a product or service for financial gain. This includes whenever you use software to create marketing materials, since those materials are used for business purposes with the intention of increasing sales.” - HubSpot
In other words: You use it as a means to make money. Plain and simple.
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It’s bad news for Obsidian, not me. There’s a million note taking applications out there.
It’s bad news for Obsidian, not me.
How is that bad news for Obsidian? The creators don’t care that you don’t use their product if you are not willing to pay for it. What a strange way to frame it like Obsidian Dev Team would need to woo you to use their product by giving it to you for free or something like that. Bizarre.
There’s a million note taking applications out there.
Those have commercial licensing requirements as well. The issue is not Obsidian, but your intent on commercial use. Obsidian actually has very generous terms btw: free for education, private use and freelance. Compare that to the license requirement of any other common software you use.
A vast majority don’t care how any individual uses them. They put collaboration features behind a paywall, but they also host the data. I liked the idea of hosting my files myself, which is what makes this all the more ridiculous. What extra cost does Obsidian incur whether I take a note about a book I read or I take a note about a meeting I was in?
This depends on what do you need form a note taking app. But if your needs are covered by many - great you have a big list to choose from.
Man, now I have to go from championing Obsidian to warning people away from it. That sucks.
I might abandon Obsidian over this.
You could just get rid of your MS Office License instead, but this seems more like a common value issue, where users don’t value the work invested in developing a tool/thing as highly as the creator.
Also: Other note-taking apps have other licensing requirements or in-app-ads. Assuming you could dodge paying for one service by migrating your operations to another one is naive.
I don’t see what function or feature would be missing from Obsidian that would make it inappropriate to use. There’s even a plugin to export html files.
