Anchors

It’s easy to manually add anchors to any block element with an identifier attribute and to reference them with a Markdown link.

Syntax

When we manually add an anchor attribute, we usually want to place one or more references somewhere else.

Anchor

We add the anchor as an identification attribute like any other attribute. We can use the long form id=our-identifier or the short form #our-identifier. It’s more consistent to use the short version because we have to use this one in the reference anyway:

This is the text block, we would like to refer to from another place on this 
page or from another page on this site.
{#our-identifier}

Reference

From the same page
The reference is a link to the anchor [link to anchor](#our-identifier).
From another page
The reference is a link to the page with the anchor appended [link to anchor](page#our-identifier).

Layout

This is the text block, we would like to refer to.

And this is the reference. When the anchored block is targeted by a reference, it gets a little background highlighting. Usually, the anchored block is far away from the reference. Then, the browser jumps to the right place.

Unfortunately, the render hook for links cannot check a manual anchor. It appears missing and produces a bogus warning, if the errorLevel: for fragments: is set to warning. This does not affect the result, the links are always rendered fine. (→ link validation).

See Also