Don't Want it to Reformat When Editing Longform

Nothing beats Logseq as an outliner. It helps me write, then drill down into ideas. Capturing context into a daily journal couldn’t be faster.

But when I cross reference an existing document, something long-form and more established Logseq converts it into an outline. Even putting a tick in front of subheaders.

A more established document or paper has YAML front matter. What I create in idea capture and outlining doesn’t have any headers. How about a setup option that doesn’t reformat if there is YAML front matter?

There is RFC7763 for a Content-Type: text/markdown, perhaps a setting that allows me to use YAML front matter to prevent reformatting or change default behavior.

When I reference a paper in the Logseq editor, then drill down to make a quick edit, that long-form paper changes. That’s not good. Especially if I’m using Obsidian or Zettlr to export that paper to PDF.

A long-form document might have Mermaid diagrams, image references, and LaTeX elements. It’s a pain to fix these things because I did a quick edit in Logseq. The Content-Type will let me fix documents or prevent reformatting.

An ideal solution would be a Pandoc compatible mode that looks for YAML or no-YAML, or a token in YAML to select outline mode or not.

Following the Content-Type from RFC would aligned with HTTP handling, as well as other text based coding. If there was a Logseq specific, it would likely be text/x-logseq if a larger standard wasn’t available.

And this implementation would be helpful to other software. I’m using Logseq for idea capture and outlining, Obsidian to cluster ideas into articles and MOC. Then both Obsidian and Zettlr to publish papers via Pandoc.

The workflow uses the same repo, everything plays together well less reformatting. I already use Content-Type: text/x-markua for what I publish via Leanpub, it keeps me from messing up sources that I might also Pandoc for drafts and proofs.

What do you think? It might help the longform concerns of the following threads:

Why make a new issue for this when multiple already exist?

Alternatively: maybe rename it to be more specific? What differentiates this feature request from the others?

I thought this was a discussion board. It looked like issues were tracked in GitHub - logseq/logseq: A privacy-first, open-source platform for knowledge management and collaboration. Download link: http://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases. roadmap: http://trello.com/b/8txSM12G/roadmap (I didn’t see any specific open reformat issues there.)

My specific request is to follow an RFC so Logseq knows the format desired for a document or change the default behavior to not reformat long-form documents in the repo.

I see this as a solution for other conversations on the topic. I also tried to write a user story because this is a unique way of handling documents in the note-taking world. Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

I think this is a great suggestion. I think it would be worth editing the original post’s topic/title so that it reflects this request.

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