As of January 2023, the docs are still going through changes, but you can safely start translating all documentation under Core Plugins (including Canvas).


To contribute: Open a vault in the /en/ folder (or your language of choice once translations are available).

Image attachments: Please use .png and compress the image using a compression tool like https://compresspng.com/ in order to keep the whole package small.

Typos and mistakes

For correcting typos and other small mistakes, you can directly submit a pull request.

Note that you don't have to clone your fork onto your hard disk to make the edits; you can do everything on GitHub's web UI. Simply open a file in your own forked repository and click on the pencil icon to start editing. After that, submit a pull request.

Missing or outdated content

We recommend opening an issue with us if you find missing or outdated content.

If you'd like to try your hand at contributing the article, we appreciate it too! Please follow the same instructions under "Typos and mistakes" to submit a pull request.

Please try to be consistent with the style of the existing documentation when adding new articles. Notably, when writing a title or a heading, do not capitalize the second or subsequent words, unless it is a proper name.

Translating

Translate existing languages

To contributing to an existing language, clone the entire forked repository onto your hard disk, and open that folder as a vault with Obsidian and proceed to translate. For example, if you're translating Italian, open the /it/ folder.

Add your language

If the language you're trying to contribute does not exist, simply copy the entire English docs (everything under /en/) and start translating.

Make completed languages available in app

Once the language you're working on is complete, open an issue to let us know. That way we can include it in the Obsidian app, so that users who set their Obsidian language to that language can see the translated documentation instead of English documentation.

Staying up-to-update

Once the documentation gets translated into a language, the English documentation will still occasionally get updated to include new features and to be more comprehensive.

There's no simple way to stay up-to-update, but in general you can browse your language folder to check out when it's last updated, and compare that with the English documentation.

If it's only a few versions behind, you can look at those changes individually, translate them, and fit them into the documentation of your language.

If your language is months behind, we recommend opening the English documentation and the documentation of your language side by side in two vaults with Obsidian, and going through each article carefully.

Adding yourself to credits

Thanks for contributing to Obsidian's documentation! To feature yourself on our [[Credits]] page, simply create a pull request to the /en/Obsidian/Credits file. You can update the YOUR LANGUAGE/Obsidian/Credits file as well.

Handling image attachments

Please use .png extensions and compress the image using a compression tool like Compress PNG in order to keep the whole package small.