Links on auto_identifiers do not work in split view

[riuttner]

I am new to Panwriter (using 0.8.10 based on Pandoc 3.9, both on Windows and MacOS), and even after carefully reading manuals on Pandoc and Panwriter, I do not understand why links in the Panwriter preview do only work if I specify an identifier right of the heading as header-attribute.

The file I am using as test is quite large and can be displayed with working links perfectly in Google Chrome with the markdown plugin. According to the manual I also tried all variants of specifying

---
title: my title
from: markdown+auto_identifiers
---

be it in the document directly as well as in the different places for file default.yaml (working dir and platform-specific PanWriterUserData). No link worked unless I added the correct target id to each heading in curly braces, which worked even without specifying the provided Pandoc extension.

A simple test case showing the issue is:

# Title

Go to [Level three](#level-three)

lore ipsum dolet 1

lore ipsum dolet 1

## Heading level two

lore ipsum dolet 2

lore ipsum dolet 2

### Level three

lore ipsum dolet 3

lore ipsum dolet 3

Go to [Top](#title)

Only if I manually add the heading ids {#title} and {#level-three} behind the respective heading, the links work and change the position inside of the preview window (you have reduce the height to notice the effect). Adding only one heading id works for that link, but does not change general behaviour for automatic ids.

The behaviour described is independent of the view mode (split view or preview only).

Now I am really curious what I could do to make all links work, because I cannot imagine that this behaviour is intended or result of something accidentally broken. BTW: I did not find any documentation about the meaning of or restriction for the value specified in the yaml title, but tried several variants of that name too without noticing a change.

[mb21]

Just for your understanding: for the preview to render quickly, it's not using pandoc but https://github.com/mb21/markdown-it-pandoc (which in turn uses markdown-it-attrs for attributes). This unfortunately sometimes has small discrepancies in behavior compared to pandoc.

[riuttner]

Thanks for the quick answer! So does that mean that links without explicit id definition never are followed if they are clicked or is there any workaround for that?

(Internally, it would "just" mean that each heading always creates its id, independently if it is specified or has to be derived from heading text.)

[mb21]

Ah, upon looking closer I see that I never added the equivalent to auto_identifiers to markdown-it-pandoc (which powers the preview). We'd have to add https://www.npmjs.com/package/markdown-it-anchor there and configure it to generate the same ids as pandoc.

For what it's worth, you can debug the HTML in the preview by hitting Cmd-Option-I on your keyboard to bring up Electron's dev tools:

[riuttner]

IMHO it would be a real gain of quality to be able to always navigate in the preview and have the editor synchronized, especially if you have big documents.

[mb21]

Yes. I've been meaning to investigate running pandoc compiled to wasm (#27). If performance is good enough, we would get 100% same HTML in the preview as pandoc on export.