Syntax cheatsheet#

What the sync script does with Obsidian-flavoured markdown.

Links#

In the vault	On the site
`[[How this works]]`	link to that page
`[[How this works\|custom text]]`	link with your label
`[[How this works#The vault]]`	link to that heading
`[[#Links]]`	link inside the same page
`[[Half-baked idea]]` (unpublished)	plain text, plus a warning
`[[Nonexistent]]`	plain text, plus a warning

Links to unpublished notes degrade to plain text rather than breaking the build. Run make check to turn those warnings into a failure instead.

Attachments#

![[Pipeline diagram.png]] embeds an image; [[report.pdf]] links a file. The file is copied next to the generated page, so it works under any baseURL.

Callouts#

Callouts map onto Hugo alerts
Obsidian’s callout syntax is the same as GitHub’s alert syntax, which Hugo parses natively. Types Obsidian knows but hugo-book has no colour for (abstract, question, bug, …) are folded onto the nearest one.

A callout with no title works too.

Front matter#

Key	Effect
`publish: true`	required, unless you run the script with `--publish-mode all`
`title:`	page title; falls back to the filename
`date:`	falls back to the file’s modification time
`weight:`	orders the sidebar menu
`tags:`	passed through to Hugo
`aliases:`	used to resolve wikilinks, then dropped

aliases is dropped on purpose: in Obsidian it means “other names for this note”, in Hugo it means “URLs that redirect here”. Passing them through would mint URLs like /docs/Start%20here/.

Left alone#

Fenced code blocks, inline code, math, HTML, and anything the script does not recognise pass through untouched. Obsidian comments %% like this %% and block ids (^abc123) are stripped.