Linking text within a draft

Linking to Markers Within a Draft

in the documentation is what you’re referring to? I didn’t get BOTH, I have used the section headers as in # and ##, what else is there? So, my [[opportunity]] draft looks like this:

Opportunity

[[Trading Strategies - Market Wizards/Panic]]

[[Trading Strategies - Market Wizards/Volatility]]

[[Trading Strategies - Market Wizards/Despite…]]

[[Trading Strategies - Market Wizards/Bad News]]

Once I click on these, I get the text. That is great. Now, if I also want the text in the [[Opportunity]] draft as well, is there an action for that?

That’s where the manual maintenance would come in.

I asked about automating to keep data in sync.

You noted that you did not need to have this ongoing. Therefore any sync would need to be manually managed.

But…

… maybe you just need a different transclusion action(s)? See my suggestion on this thread.

You’re referring to these:

  • TAD-Embed a Draft - this shows the links, but doesn’t show the text beneath the link.

  • TAD-Refresh Embeds of this Draft

  • TAD-Refresh Embeds in this Draft

Yes I am, and yes it would.

The first one would transclude the draft content you select. It inserts the content and details of where the content was sourced from so as to enable refreshing.

The second and third ones provide ways to refresh the content, based on if you are in the source draft or the referencing draft respectively.

Thanks and I’m glad it does. I tried it, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Obviously I’m doing something wrong. What happens is that, continuing with the above example, once I run TAD-Embed a Draft action, it embeds the ENTIRE draft, not just the one points that have [[Opportunity]]. So, if that is the way it is supposed to work, then it’s ok. But, I thought that it will only embed the relevant ones. So, if you can clarify that, or if there is someway of embedding a selection, then it would be awesome. Thanks a ton.

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As a devoted user of Drafts I admit to not using it for everything. In this case I think that you are trying to force fit something into Drafts that can be done much more easily elsewhere. One option is Roam, which is designed to handle problems like this. But, Roam is relatively expensive, so Logseq - which is free - may be a better choice. I’m going to try and attach three screenshots from Logseq.

The first shows a Daily Note Page that has entries I took from your postings - each referencing one of your areas of interest. In the first entry I added several layers of indentation, just to show how that works.

The second shows the page “Strategic Insights”. The top entry was made directly onto that page. The others are “linked references” from the Daily Note Page. The first of those entries demonstrates that a page reference applied to a top level applies as well to indented information below it. Block and child blocks in Logseq and Roam lingo.

Using Logseq, entries can be made on any page and – if referenced to a different page (as I did with the Daily Note Page) – they will all be collected on the referenced page as linked references.

The third screenshot shows a so-called Map of Content, or structured note in Zettelkasten-speak. It is a page on which links to pages devoted to individual areas of interest are placed. Its purpose is to simplify navigation.

Screen Shot 2021-11-12 at 8.14AM

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Thanks. This is useful for sure. If logseq is free, what’s the catch? I went to the website and it seems that it combines the features of Roam and Obsidian and costs zero. Not that I mind, but just wondering …

Okay, sorry, yes - it will do the entire draft. To embed a section, you would need to build out those actions further to distinguish parts of a draft. E.g., a navigation marker, line number, or a physical marker you include such as the number in a list, or a delimiter.

Cool. I knew Roam supported block level transclusion, but I had always equated Logseq more towards Obsidian territory. I didn’t realise it had support for block level transclusion.

Ok. Last question, is there any Action that I can use to SORT my draft based on the words that I’ve put in the [square brackets]? That’ll make things easier for me and I can then try Logseq as suggested by the other gentleman.

Logseq is open source software. I don’t know of any catch. Obsidian is also free for personal use.

I should have pointed out another advantage. You can reference an entry to more than one page - the same entry can appear on several different pages.

Not seen one. But, you are specifying something pretty bespoke. You could certainly create one.

If you parse the main content and the links into arrays, you could apply this and replace the content.

But depending upon how you apply numbering to your items, you might either need to standardise on 1., or renumbered too.

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

Many thanks to everyone who has chimed in on this thread. I really appreciate it. What a resourceful forum this is, amazing.

I tend to agree with @bjb. You can reproduce a lot of this functionality in Drafts if you try hard enough, but it’s not really built for it. If block-based referencing is your goal, a block-based app (like Logseq or Roam) is better suited to the task.

Many with those sorts of needs use Drafts alongside as a capture tool and push to those systems for long-term storage/reference.

Aside: I get that Drafts isn’t designed with this kind of knowledge management in mind, but speaking as someone who’s tried many of the new-gen PKM tools available at time of this post, I really appreciate the features you’ve introduced over the past year or so that go at least part-way, and I’m happy that Drafts has thus far met a functional majority of my knowledge management needs. Just saying.

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Yes, very true. Actually, even If your Block Level Filter Action which is a preview can in some way be converted into a new draft it opens up many possibilities. The problem with the Roam types is that there is too much ‘noise’, the product isn’t FULLY developed, and you can’t use it on an iPad. In the overall scheme of things, like you said, drafts just rules, wins whatever.

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Right. And I don’t want to use Drafts as an intermediary; I want stuff to stay there - and will build eg automation to make it so. It doesn’t seem this thread stretches this too far.

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Oh, well that’s do-able. :wink:

Could do with some polish…

  • The draft(s) produced by this action will skew the results for future searches. It might be better to output to a fixed draft every time. That would allow users to work with filter results as a slide over or split screen draft sidebar/panel. Alternatively, I’d need to hide the draft(s) produced by this action from the filter for future searches… that actually might be a useful addition to the original action’s settings— an “ignore drafts tagged with…” option… This has been taken care of… added “ignoreResultsTaggedWith” preference to suppress results from drafts produced by this action (tagged with “filter output” by default).
  • As this action actually creates a draft (rather than presenting results in a menu), we’ll need a separate action to target the exact location of any specific block of context within its source draft. I’m sure something along these lines already exists… Doh! Highlight the block you want to locate and use the original action.
  • Including the UUID probably isn’t necessary. Edge case: might be useful if a title is updated before the filter output is refreshed? Edit: the UUID is more useful than I anticipated…
  • Ultimately, this could be just be folded into the original action as an option from the initial prompt.
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Excellent, that is perfect. Thank you so much. If I have to learn, is this all JavaScript or exactly what is the coding language for the drafts app?

Mainly JavaScript for the bits you’re particularly interested in, yes. The original action also has an HTML/CSS component, which I’m not particularly good with— it’s on one of my todo lists to determine how to add an extra button or two to the bottom of @mattgemmell’s original checklist prompt…