nextcloud / nextcloud/notes

Correct formatting of Front Matter

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#395 3 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement needs discussion
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
738
Forks
162
Avg merge
6h 2m
Merged PRs (30d)
35

Description

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Many projects which use markdown to store their content implement "Front Matter" as a way to attach metadata to markdown files. Front Matter stores information either in YAML, JSON or sometimes TOML. The location of Front Matter is – as the name implies – at the beginning of the file and denoted by either a leading and trailing --- (YAML), ;;; (JSON) or +++ (TOML).

I use Front matter in my notes to annotate some meta data in a structured way.

Notes does not support the usage of this syntax.

Describe the solution you'd like
While I do not expect Notes to parse and use information from Front Matter (though there may be cases where this could be useful), I'd at least like Notes to render the Front Matter as if its contents were in a code fence.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Front matter could also be rendered as if it was normal text, where none of the markdown syntax applies. Right now, it doesn't do this.

Another alternative would be to implement Front Matter in a more sophisticated way and to actually use the metadata. The data could as an example be used for templating the notes filenames. But I consider my proposed solution to be kind of a minimal and quick approach to this problem.

Additional context
How it renders right now:
grafik
How I'd like it to render (but of course with the Front Matter denotion instead):
grafik


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Research direction

The issue does not identify files, tests, or an entry point. Locate the Notes markdown rendering path and first verify how YAML, JSON, and TOML front matter is currently rendered. Done means front matter at the beginning of a note is displayed like a code fence rather than being parsed as ordinary Markdown.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript, markdown
Domain
content, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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