A broader definition of external links

[yett]

Hi, so I’m using the external link syntax for simple annotations in live preview. As you can see in the screenshot, they work as intended in Live Preview, that I can alt+click on the links to edit and view comments inside the curly brackets ().

However in the Preview Mode, only links with a valid URL are rendered as external links (as in bullet point 5).
For strings without spaces (as in 2, 4), Preview Mode treats them as unresolved links and displays the URL instead of the text we want to display.
For strings with spaces in between (as in 1,3), Preview doesn’t recognize them as links.

Since embeds are in Preview Mode, this becomes a problem when I reference these blocks from other notes.

So my question is, is there any way that I can make Obsidian recognize all of these formats as real links, and just display the text in square brackets[]? Any CSS snippets that could make this possible?

Thanks!

[holroy]

What kind of links do you perceive these as? Other notes?

It’s not very clear what you’re trying to achieve. At least not for me…

[yett]

Sorry if I didn’t make it clear, but I’m trying to use []() as a way to add comments to specific words. For example, if I wish to annotate Obsidian in the sentence below:

Obsidian is the private and flexible writing app that adapts to the way you think.

I would do:

[Obsidian](a hard, dark, glasslike volcanic rock) is the private and flexible writing app that adapts to the way you think.

and hopefully (a hard, dark, glasslike volcanic rock) would collapse in Live Preview & Preview and only show up when you click on the link.

[holroy]

This kind of looks like a misuse of the external link, which I don’t think you should except to be allowed anytime soon.

I’d rather use footnotes for stuff like that, or the custom option discussed in the thread below.

Change font size of tooltips

So after writing this post I did a different google search, and came across this stackoverflow post: It basically says, that you can’t change the tooltip from the title attribute, as it default to the display by the browser in use. Bummer. However, it continues to show some alternate stylings related to the title attribute, or other attributes, which also provides me with a solution for single line attributes. So if I change my markup to be: <span data-tip="One liner">test</span> And add t…

Using footnotes you would enter text like:

Obsidian^[a hard, dark, glasslike volcanic rock] is the private and flexible writing app that adapts to the way you think.

Which if that was the only text renders as:

Using the tip of the other thread, depending on hovering or not, one could write something like:

<span data-tip="(a hard, dark, glasslike volcanic rock)">Obsidian</span> is the private and flexible writing app that adapts to the way you think.

And get the output:

or when hovered:

Hope this helps to some extent.

[berot3]

There is also a plugin that adds a nice hover-view for footnotes.

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PS offtopic:
What’s that font you use, looks quite nice @yett

[yett]

Thanks for providing so many details! I play with external links because I want the comments to be inline and foldable, and that seems to be the only syntax that works this way. While HTML tags seem a little bit chuncky.
I just discovered that I could use tooltips as comments, and you only need a colon : to make obsidian recognize the syntax as a link. So in the end a note will look like this, when hovered in Preview it gives you a small frame of tooltip:

[Obsidian](: "a hard, dark, glasslike volcanic rock") is the private and flexible writing app that adapts to the way you think.

And thank you for reminding me of the footnotes, I tried it before but decided it was a pain to sort through the index, but it seems that there are quite a few plugins to solve this problem.

[yett]

Thanks! I looked into the plugins for footnotes and that helped a lot. The font is Nunito-Bold and you can download it directly from google fonts: Nunito - Google Fonts