Zettelmarkup: Second Steps
After you have learned the basic concepts and markup of Zettelmarkup (paragraphs, emphasized text, and lists), this zettel introduces you into the concepts of links, thematic breaks, and headings.
Links
A Zettelstore is much more useful, if you connect related zettel. If you read a zettel later, this allows you to know about the context of a zettel. Zettelmarkup allows you to specify such a connection. A connection can be specified within a paragraph via Links.
- A link always starts with two left square bracket characters and ends with two right square bracket characters: [[...]].
- Within these character sequences you specify the zettel identifier of the zettel you want to reference: [[00001007903000]] will connect to zettel containing the first steps into Zettelmarkup.
- In addition, you should give the link a more readable description. This is done by prepending the description before the reference and use the vertical bar character to separate both: [[First Steps|00001007903000]].
You are not restricted to reference your zettel. Alternatively, you might specify an URL of an external website: [[Zettelstore|https://zettelstore.de]]. Of course, if you just want to specify the URL, you are allowed to omit the description: [[https://zettelstore.de]]
Zettelmarkup | Rendered output | Remark |
[[00001007903000]] | 00001007903000 | If no description is given, the zettel identifier acts as a description |
[[First Steps|00001007903000]] | First Steps | The description should be chosen so that you are not confused later |
[[https://zettelstore.de]] | https://zettelstore.de | A link to an external URL is rendered differently |
[[Zettelstore|https://zettelstore.de]] | Zettelstore | You can use any URL your browser is able to support |
Again, you probably see a principle.
Thematic Breaks
And now for something completely different.
Sometimes, you want to insert a thematic break into your text, because two paragraphs do not separate enough. In Zettelmarkup is is done by entering three or more hyphen-minus characters at the beginning of a new line. You must not include blank lines around this line, but it can be more readable if you want to look at the Zettelmarkup text.
First paragraph.
---
Second paragraph.
First paragraph.
---
Second paragraph.
Both are rendered as:
First paragraph.
Second paragraph.
Try it!
This might be the time to relax a rule about paragraphs. You must not specify a blank line to end a paragraph. Any Zettelmarkup that must start at the beginning of a new line will end a previous paragraph. Similar, a blank line must not precede a paragraph.
This applies also to lists, as given in the first steps, as well as other similar markup you will probably later.
Headings
Headings explicitly structure a zettel, similar to thematic breaks, but gives the resulting part a name.
To specify a heading in Zettelmarkup, you must enter at least three equal signs, followed by a space, followed by the text of the heading. Everything must be one the same line.
The number of equal signs determines the importance of the heading: less equal signs means more important. Therefore, three equal signs treat a heading as most important. It is a level-1 heading. Zettelmarkup supports up to five levels. To specify such a heading, you must enter seven equal signs, plus the space and the text. If you enter more than seven equal signs, the resulting heading is still of level 5.
See the description of headings for more details and examples.