is it possible to link to target $Text straight from ziplink without having to use the link park feature?
Yes, see here. Indeed, I donât think the ziplink feature works except by typing everything into to $Text.
Thanks, Mark,
maybe I didnât ask the question right.
Of course, I read the article of ziplinks first.
What I meant is can I make a ziplink point to a specific word in the destination $Text?
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(BTW, the aTbRef link wasnât critique. as itâs author I try to avoid the hubris of assuming everyoneâs read it! Plus, there is a lot of contentâŚ)
Drilling down a bit, I think the pertinent part is here:
Adding a backlink from the link target
From v8.7.0, Ziplinks can create backlinks from the destination note. [[]] will create a link to âthat noteâ, and then will append the name of this note to the text of âthat noteâ and link the name back to this note.
Which in truth is a partial âYesâ. You can add a back-link. You canât add a user-specified anchor _in the target app as ziplinks essentially create a text-to-note link, as opposed to a text-to-text or note-to-text link.
One problem, using a deliberate edge case, is how do you specify the target anchor. Letâs assume the target text is the word the; yes, unlikely, but I sue it to illuminate issues we users mentally gloss over. So, I specify âtheâ as the target anchor. But the word occurs many times in the target so how does the app know which one to chose.
Using a link park does allow you to be explicit about to the exact thing to which you meant to link. I know we users roll our eyes at the (small amount of extra) work involved. Still, I donât see how you set an anchor text using just a text string is the text is not unique. Plus, if you had to (probably) look that the target note first that might be the time to make the link.
If to-text links seemless useual, it reflects the Tinderbox communities use of them. The method was allowed for in early versions of the app. But, it appeared little used and was support was dropped in v5. The method formally returned in v7.5.0.
If the lack of use seems odd, bear in mind that in the early design paradigm of the app notes were short. If you wanted a longer article, you likely make another note (sibling or nested) that write more $Text in the current note. As a result, linking to a discrete anchor within the text wasnât really needed as the small target context meant context was pretty apparent.
Roll forward to more powerful computers, bigger screens and longer notes, that nuance is lost. It is also not clear whether we link to text so as to scroll to the right part of the doc (such as the paragraph referencing a quote) or link directly to a quote. Does it matter? Not particularly, except to point up that as in many other parts of the app we may be doing the same functional task for differing reason (and assuming everyone else does as we do).
I made that digression simply to ensure that in clarifying this, the function targetting a substring of $Text doesnât make blithe assumption(s) as to why we are doing this lest the featureâs function drift from the underlying purpose.
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What I meant is can I make a ziplink point to a specific word in the destination $Text?
Nope. I think this would be very awkward to specify. What would the syntax be? [[Frobisher]] links to a note named Frobisher, so I guess [[Frobisher:explorer]] could link to the word âexplorerâ in the note named âFrobisherâ. But what if there is not such word? What happens if there are seventeen occurrences? What happens if we edit the text?
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Thank you Mark and Mark
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