Markdown

When viewing longer Markdown notes in Obsidian, tables of content (TOC) help a lot with navigation. There is a handful of community plugins to help with TOC generation, but I have two issues with them:

1. It creates a dependency on code whose developer may lose interest and eventually abandon the project. At least one dynamic TOC plugin has suffered this fate.
2. All of the TOC plugins have the same visual result. When you navigate to a note, Obsidian places the focus at the top of the note, beneath the frontmatter. That’s fine unless the content starts with a TOC markup block, in which case it’s not the TOC itself that is displayed, but the markup for the TOC plugin itself as depicted in the image below.

For me the solution was to write a script that scans the vault looking for this pair of markers:

I write in Markdown because it’s much easier to keep the flow of writing going without taking my hands off the keyboard.

I also like to write content in Anki cards in Markdown. Over the years there have been various ways in of supporting this through add-ons:

• The venerable Power Format Pack was great but no longer supports Anki 2.1, so it became useless.
• Auto Markdown worked for a while but as of Anki version 2.1.41 does not.
• After Auto Markdown stopped working, I installed the supposed fix Auto Markdown - fix version but that didn’t work either.
• It’s possible that the Mini Format Pack will work, but honestly I’m tired of the constant break-fix-break-fix cycle with Anki.

The problem

The real problem with Markdown add-ons for Anki is the same as every other add-on. They are all hanging by a thread. Almost every minor point upgrade of Anki breaks at least one of my add-ons. It’s nearly impossible to determine in advance whether an Anki upgrade is going to break some key functionality that I rely on. And add-on developers, even prominent and prolific ones come and go when they get busy, distracted or disinterested. It’s one of the most frustrating parts of using Anki.

TIL how to use anchors in Markdown documents. I needed to use this in a long blog post in my Octopress blog and was stymied.

As usual, I found the answer on Stack Overflow.

Beam me [up](#enterprise), Scotty

<a id="enterprise"></a>

It’s a great way to move around in longer content.

2014-03-03: I no longer publish using Octopress; but this should work in most cases where Markdown is used. Bitbucket is a notable exception. For Github wiki, you’ll need something like: