Treat callouts as headings

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

  • Currently, I (and I’m sure many other people) use callouts extensively in Obsidian notes (in my case, to summarise academic papers).
  • However, these callouts are not treated as ‘heading’ blocks - i.e. any block of text between two headings. This causes a number of annoyances, such as:
    • Cannot link to a heading using the [[text#heading]] syntax, which requires you to add a block code below every callout you want to link or embed. This introduces visual clutter and looks bad (it also means the title of the callout is not visible in the link)
    • Smart Connections plugin treats the whole note as a single block, even when it is divided very clearly into callouts, reducing its usefulness.
  • This harms the usecase of callouts as a (more visually distinct) alternative to splitting your notes into headers, and I’m sure there are other situations where treating callouts as headers would make it easier to use them as sections.

Proposed solution

  • I don’t know how Obsidian is coded so this might just be impossible, but I’m hoping there’s some kind of metadata or tag that could be updated so that callouts could be treated similarly to headings for embedding or linking purposes, with the callout title in place of the heading title.

Potential problems

  • The only reason for not doing this is that some people may prefer callouts not to be treated as headings, e.g. if you would want a callout to be included with its most recent heading when linking.
  • One way around this would be to treat a callout as a very low-level heading (e.g. a ‘level 7’ heading), so that it did not affect current embedding/linking functionality.
  • Another option is to simply have this togglable in the settings.
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2

Callouts are (in this case Obsidian specific) markdown elements with a specific meaning. They are, by design, not intended to have the semantic meaning of a header.

Instead, you should probably look into changing the appearance of a header using a css block.

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3

To be clear, I’m requesting an option for the title of a callout itself to be treated as a header (making all the text in the callout ‘heading text’ associated with that heading). Currently callouts are treated identically to any other paragraph, which makes it harder to link to them as shown.

image

E.g., in this case I would like to link to the ‘Summary’ callout of this page via header linking ([note#Summary]) rather than having to create a block link for every single callout I use.

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