Obsidian - Lesser-Known Markdown Tips and Tricks

#Obsidian

About

Not all of Obsidian's capabilities are thoroughly documented in the Obsidian Help Docs.

That's not to say that the docs are lacking – they are an excellent primer on using Obsidian. What is lacking is some of the more particular, obscure workarounds inherent to Markdown and HTML content in Markdown. These are generally for very specific use-cases.

Caption

An image as a clickable link|wm-m

A link displayed as an image – clicking the link will take you to the homepage.

Want to create a button or an image that links to a different note or an external web page?

We can do this by wrapping an embedded image inside the square brackets ([ ]) of a standard Markdown link. Inside the square brackets we would insert the Markdown for either:

![[Engelbart.jpg]]

![Engelbart](https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Basis/images/Engelbart.jpg)

Using an image to link to an external web page:

Eternal image:

[![image alt text](url to image)](https://www.some-website.com)

Internal image embedded via wikilink:

[![[wikilink to image.png]]](https://www.some-website.com)

Using an image to link to an internal page does not work using the standard [[wikilink]] syntax.

Instead, it is formatted like a Markdown link, with the exception that instead of a URL in the (brackets), you would put the page name surrounded by < >. So, [[page title]] would instead be written as (<page title>)

Here is the full formatting:

Eternal image:

[![image alt text](url to image)](<page name>)

Internal image embedded via wikilink:

[![[wikilink to image.png]]](<page name>)

Wikipedia-Style 'Inline Cleanup Tags'

Using the HTML <sup> (superscript) tag, we can create a Wikipedia-style Inline Cleanup Tag.

You may have seen them before while trawling a wiki article – they look like this:

Note

clean

HTML Superscript Tags

Obsidian-Flavored Markdown accepts the superscript HTML tag ('<sup> </sup>').

In practice, superscript reduces the font size, raises the line height and (optionally) changes the font of a string of text. Wikilinks and external links can be rendered inside the tags, and the text can also be styled with standard Markdown.[super important tag]

The Markdown, for internal and external links respectively, is formatted like so:

<sup>\[_[[name of tag]]_\]</sup>

<sup>\[_[name of tag](url)_\]</sup>

The HTML method is functional, but tedious to format. this could be alleviated by creating templates for the tags, possibly even using Templater so that the tags can be inserted around a highlighted string of text.

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