Internal links within single document

#1

(This is more of a conceptual question, and a search of the forums didn’t turn up what I was looking for…)

I’m looking to make a clickable ‘link’ to a project within the same document. For instance, I’d like to use a clickable item path to jump from one part of my outline to another:

Today:
    - /Groceries
    - Run
    - /Blog/Edit

Groceries:
    - Apples
    - Bananas
    - Oranges

Blog:
    - Decide on topic
    - Quick draft
    Edit:
        - Incorporate Sarah's comments
        - Fix Links

For example, under the Today project, you’d be able to click on /Groceries to focus on the Groceries project. And you could similarly click on /Blog/Edit to focus on the Edit subproject.

I have two questions:

  1. Is there a ‘right’ way to get the kind of behavior I’m looking for? Is it ‘right’ to use the sidebar to jump around instead of using internal text-based shortcuts? Should I not be listing project references within other projects?

  2. @jessegrosjean, are there plans for adding support for internal document shortcuts like this?

#2

While not ideal, this issue has somewhat been addressed here.

Essentially, you could add a link to the file itself and then implement what @jessegrosjean suggests. I can’t test this out at the moment, but pretty sure it should work.

Like I said, not ideal, but could suffice for now :wink:

#3

I don’t think there’s any “right” way at the moment. As @pslobo says you can hack your own system one TaskPaper with scripts, but there’s nothing built in. An official mechanism for internal links is a feature that I think makes sense, but I don’t have any immediate plans to add it.

#4

I think internal links in a Taskpaper document could be implemented as search expressions. Especially xpath expressions seem very good at referring unambigously to a specific place in the document - even to a specific paragraph in a note.

The embedded search could be utilized to support a sort of clickable links. If you click what’s inside the parenthesis in an embedded search today, you won’t get any meaningful search. Often the search expression also is marked as erroneous in the search bar. If clicking on the search expression instead run that search, we could utilize it as clickable internal links.

We most often don’t want these searches popping up in the side bar, so it would require that only embedded searches under the project “Searches:” would be listed under Searches in the side bar.