How to link to part of the same document in Markdo

Question

I am writing a large Markdown document and would like to place a table of contents of sorts at the beginning that will provide links to various locations in the document. How can I do this?

I tried using

[a link](# MyTitle)

where MyTitle is a title within the document and this didn't work.

Answer 1

yes, markdown does do this but you need to specify the name anchor <a name='xyx'>.

a full example,

this creates the link
[tasks](#tasks)

later in the document, you create the named anchor (whatever it is called).

<a name="tasks">
   my tasks
</a>

note that you could also wrap it around the header too.

<a name="tasks">
### Agile tasks (created by developer)
</a>

Answer 2

Since MultiMarkdown was mentioned as an option in comments.

In MultiMarkdown the syntax for an internal link is simple.

For any heading in the document simply give the heading name in this format [heading][] to create an internal link.

Read more here: MultiMarkdown-5 Cross-references.

Cross-References

An oft-requested feature was the ability to have Markdown automatically handle within-document links as easily as it handled external links. To this aim, I added the ability to interpret [Some Text][] as a cross-link, if a header named “Some Text” exists.

As an example, [Metadata][] will take you to # Metadata (or any of ## Metadata, ### Metadata, #### Metadata, ##### Metadata, ###### Metadata).

Alternatively, you can include an optional label of your choosing to help disambiguate cases where multiple headers have the same title:

### Overview [MultiMarkdownOverview] ##

This allows you to use [MultiMarkdownOverview] to refer to this section specifically, and not another section named Overview. This works with atx- or settext-style headers.

If you have already defined an anchor using the same id that is used by a header, then the defined anchor takes precedence.

In addition to headers within the document, you can provide labels for images and tables which can then be used for cross-references as well.

Answer 3

Experimenting, I found a solution using <div…/> but an obvious solution is to place your own anchor point in the page wherever you like, thus:

<a name="abcde">

before and

</a>

after the line you want to 'link' to. Then a markdown link like:

[link text](#abcde)

anywhere in the document takes you there.

The <div…/> solution inserts a "dummy" division just to add the id property, and this is potentially disruptive to the page structure, but the <a name="abcde"/> solution ought to be quite innocuous.

(PS: It might be OK to put the anchor in the line you wish to link to, as follows:

## <a name="head1">Heading One</a>

but this depends on how Markdown treats this. I note, for example, the Stack Overflow answer formatter is happy with this!)

Answer 4

Using kramdown, it seems like this works well:

[I want this to link to foo](#foo)
....
....
{: id="foo"}
### Foo are you?

I see it's been mentioned that

[foo][#foo]
....
#Foo

works efficiently, but the former might be a good alternative for elements besides headers or else headers with multiple words.

Answer 5

Github automatically parses anchor tags out of your headers. So you can do the following:

[Foo](#foo)

# Foo

In the above case, the Foo header has generated an anchor tag with the name foo

Note: just one # for all heading sizes, no space between # and anchor name, anchor tag names must be lowercase, and delimited by dashes if multi-word.

[click on this link](#my-multi-word-header)

### My Multi Word Header

Update

Works out of the box with pandoc too.

Answer 6

In pandoc, if you use the option --toc in producing html, a table of contents will be produced with links to the sections, and back to the table of contents from the section headings. It is similar with the other formats pandoc writes, like LaTeX, rtf, rst, etc. So with the command

pandoc --toc happiness.txt -o happiness.html

this bit of markdown:

% True Happiness

Introduction
------------

Many have posed the question of true happiness.  In this blog post we propose to
solve it.

First Attempts
--------------

The earliest attempts at attaining true happiness of course aimed at pleasure. 
Soon, though, the downside of pleasure was revealed.

will yield this as the body of the html:

    <h1 class="title">
        True Happiness
    </h1>
    <div id="TOC">
        <ul>
            <li>
                <a href="#introduction">Introduction</a>
            </li>
            <li>
                <a href="#first-attempts">First Attempts</a>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </div>
    <div id="introduction">
        <h2>
            <a href="#TOC">Introduction</a>
        </h2>
        <p>
            Many have posed the question of true happiness. In this blog post we propose to solve it.
        </p>
    </div>
    <div id="first-attempts">
        <h2>
            <a href="#TOC">First Attempts</a>
        </h2>
        <p>
            The earliest attempts at attaining true happiness of course aimed at pleasure. Soon, though, the downside of pleasure was revealed.
        </p>
    </div>