Indirect Links in Markdown

1

I’m adding indirect links to md2pptx - because tools like iThoughts seem to generate them.

These are of the form:

[IBM Website][toIBM]

[toIBM]: https://www.ibm.com

As opposed to:

[IBM Website](https://www.ibm.com)

I believe the latter type of link is called an inline link.

Anyhow, I’m wondering what he advantages are for one over the other - and would probably allude to the trade offs between them in the enhanced documentation for md2pptx.

Also, I’m thinking I could harvest the links to make an optional “external links” slide - at the end of the presentation md2pptx generates. I wonder what people think of that idea.

But mostly I’m interested in indirect versus inline link usefulness.

2

Two benefits:

  1. Single source for URL maintenance.
  2. Gives you a single list of all URLS used, assuming you use it consistently and exclusively.

For what it is worth, it is a standard Markdown option for links, so if you want your tool to be Markdown compatible, then it should technically support their use.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link

3

I’d also add that it would make the Markdown document easier to read and work with. ibm.com isn’t a long URL but that’s rarely the case for me so this could be pretty cool to implement.

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4

Thanks. My stance - which might be a little defeatist - is “make everything my tool can use be valid Markdown”. This is not quite the same thing. But I’m converging on Markdown.

The other thing - which is partly why I asked about it - is improve the utility of expression.

5

Thanks. Anything to make it easier to write presentations (that could equally become drafts or documents).

It’s actually quite easy to implement.

I’m wondering about whether harvesting links and optionally doing something else with them would be useful. first idea is to allow an optional “external links” slide to be created. (I already do footnotes and Taskpaper tasks as slides at the back of the presentation so this is in that spirit.) In general I’m winning when I use md2pptx over making Powerpoint presentations by hand - so this would put me even further ahead.

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6

Reminding myself that Inline Links tend to be called “Reference Links”. I should probably use that term in the docs to describe the pre-existing support.

7

Every second I avoid being in PPT, even when having to create a deck, is a second in pursuit of a better life!

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8

Entirely agree. The only problem with that is when I collaborate with someone who insists on doing it the hard way.

9

Shipped in md2pptx v2.4.3 - for the few people using it.

And thanks for the comments I’ve used to help write the documentation for this feature.