1 The [[/plugins/toc]] plugin is very useful but it creates anchors with names such as #index1h3
3 In #ikiwiki today, another user and I were in agreement that an option for human readable anchors would be preferable.
5 > +1 - i would love to see that happen too. Here's a patch I wrote a while back for similar functionality in moinmoin: https://svn.koumbit.net/koumbit/trunk/patches/moinmoin/nice_headings.patch -- [[anarcat]]
9 I started looking into this again after getting annoyed at the
10 unreadable anchors, and here's what I came up with.
12 [[!template id=gitbranch branch=anarcat/toc-recycle-id author="[[anarcat]]"]]
14 The first step is to fix [[plugins/toc]] to use headings: we can
15 figure out how to generate those later, but it would be nice if the
16 toc directive would just reuse existing headings instead of relying on
17 its own. I do this by simply checking if there's a `id` field (which
18 is, by standard, unique) and reuse that when building the table of
19 contents. This requires parsing HTML element attributes, but that
20 shouldn't impact performance too much, hopefully. The old IDs are
21 still generated for backwards compatibility. This is done in
22 my [toc-recycle-id branch][] (see [921a264][]).
24 [921a264]: https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki/commit/27d5d9d126b6b675ad273ebd63095df0c921a264
25 [toc-recycle-id branch]: https://gitlab.com/anarcat/ikiwiki/commits/toc-id-recycle
27 The second step is to generate those headings. There are two ways of
30 1. enable multimarkdown. by default, the [[plugins/mdwn]] plugin will
31 add `id` anchors when using [Text::Multimarkdown][] which is
32 simply a matter of adding `multimarkdown: 1` in the setup file
34 > I don't think multimarkdown is a good solution. It served a useful
35 > purpose when we were defaulting to [[!cpan Text::Markdown]] or to
36 > `markdown.pl`, but now that we're using Discount by default,
37 > Multimarkdown is mostly a trap for the unwary - it's a less predictable
38 > and (in general) less featureful parser than Discount. Ideally we'd
39 > always be using CommonMark or Discount these days, but as
40 > far as I know there's still no API-stable CommonMark library. --[[smcv]]
42 2. enable the [[plugins/headinganchors]] plugin. if multimarkdown is
43 disabled, this can also provide usable identifiers.
45 An issue I had with the latter plugin was that it did not work if
46 multimarkdown was enabled, as it doesn't match headings if they
47 already have a `id` attribute. It also doesn't deal very well with
48 non-ASCII characters: they get basically garbled into their numeric
49 representation. I have therefore written a derivative of the
50 headinganchor plugin called [[plugins/contrib/i18nheadinganchors]] to
51 work around those issues.
53 It would be great to see the `toc` part of this patchset merged, at
54 least. It could also be a configurable option, but that seems overkill
55 considering that backwards compatibility is kept... --[[anarcat]]
57 [Text::Multimarkdown]: http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=dist&query=Text%3A%3AMarkdown
59 [[!tag wishlist patch]]