Writerside Help

Links and references

When writing content, reference other related content to improve search and navigation for your readers.

Use the <a> element to add a link to another topic, an anchor inside a topic, or an external URL. In Markdown topics, use the standard notation for Markdown links: []().

<a href="target.topic">Link text</a>
[Link text](target.topic)

Here is what the previous link will look like: Link text

You can format the link text with inline elements.

<a href="target.topic"><code>doThis()</code></a>
[`doThis()`](target.topic)

Here is how the previous link will render: doThis()

Without any text, Writerside will use the title of the referenced element or the URL if it is an external link. For example, here is how you can add a link to https://www.jetbrains.com:

<a href="https://www.jetbrains.com"/>
[](https://www.jetbrains.com)

When you reuse topics in different instances, a link may point to a topic that does not exist in the current instance. In this case, the build will fail unless you filter out the link for the instance. Alternatively, you can make a link nullable, and then Writerside will render just the link text if the target topic does not exist.

<a href="some.topic" nullable="true">link text</a>
[link text](some.topic){nullable="true"}

Markdown links

  • Press Alt+Insert to open the Insert menu, and then select Link.

    Alternatively, press Ctrl+Shift+U.

    If you previously copied a URL to the clipboard, Writerside will insert the URL as the target of the link.

By default, every chapter in a Markdown topic has an ID based on the chapter heading. To assign a custom ID to a chapter or any other element, use the id attribute.

## Chapter one Text in chapter one ## Chapter two {id="second"} Text in chapter two ## Example links Here is [a link to the first chapter](#chapter-one). Here is [a link to the second chapter](#second). Here is [a link to another topic](another_topic.md). Here is [a link to an anchor in another topic](another_topic.md#anchor). Here is [a link to the JetBrains website](https://www.jetbrains.com/).

To define the custom link summary, specify it in quotes after the link target:

[Link text](Topic.md "A summary to display when hovering over the link")

In Markdown, you can use reference-style links to insert them multiple times within a topic. To do this, you need to declare the link inside that topic with a reference name and reference the link by this name:

You can reference [the JetBrains website][jb] multiple times and even use [different link text][jb] every time. Or reference an [anchor ID][anchor]. [jb]: https://www.jetbrains.com [anchor]: #some-id

See also

Use the <seealso> element to add a section at the bottom of the page with links to content and resources that may be related to this topic.

<seealso> <category ref="related"> <a href="Links.topic">Topic about links</a> <a href="Some_other.topic"/> </category> <category ref="external"> <a href="https://www.google.com">Google</a> <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com"/> </category> </seealso>

See how this section looks at the bottom of the current page. You can set <seealso style="cards"> to render related links as cards instead of a list of links.

Define the list of categories in the c.list file. Make sure that you register the file in writerside.cfg as <categories src="c.list"/>.

Here is an example of the c.list file:

<!DOCTYPE categories SYSTEM "https://resources.jetbrains.com/writerside/1.0/categories.dtd"> <categories> <category id="related" name="Related topics" order="1"/> <category id="external" name="External resources" order="2"/> </categories>
Last modified: 21 June 2024
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