Notes in Obsidian are Markdown: text with a few characters in it that carry meaning — two asterisks for bold, a hash for a heading, square brackets for a link. Quartz reads these characters and makes the page from them. This chapter shows every element you can write this way on a short page of its own: first the source in a code block, directly below it what the site makes of it.
For copying
The box at the top of every page is exactly what you type in Obsidian. Whoever wants to rebuild an element copies it — and compares the result with the one below.
The thirteen sections
| Section | What is in it |
|---|---|
| 2.1 – Text | bold, italic, strikethrough, highlighted, special characters, line breaks |
| 2.2 – Structure | headings, paragraphs, horizontal rules |
| 2.3 – Lists | unordered, ordered, tasks, nesting |
| 2.4 – Links | wikilinks, jump targets, external links, aliases, embeds |
| 2.5 – Callouts | all thirteen types, foldable, nested |
| 2.6 – Code | inline, blocks, languages, line highlighting |
| 2.7 – Tables | basic form, alignment, cell contents, wide tables |
| 2.8 – Mathematics | formulas inline and as a block |
| 2.9 – Diagrams | Mermaid: fourteen kinds of diagram on six pages |
| 2.10 – Footnotes | footnotes, variants, comments |
| 2.11 – Properties | frontmatter, data types, display |
| 2.12 – Media | images, sizes, video, audio, documents, embeds |
| 2.13 – Odds and ends | HTML, escapes, arrows, emoji |
What is not a Markdown page — bases, canvas and Excalidraw — stands in 3 – Obsidian formats. What a page’s frontmatter does — draft, date, alias, cover image — stands in 4 – Controlling a page.
What Obsidian can do and Quartz cannot
Obsidian and Quartz speak almost the same language, but not quite. These deviations were measured on the built site; the linked page shows in each case what works instead.
| In Obsidian | On the site | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
Tasks with intermediate states ([/], [-], [?]) | only open and done; any other character becomes an empty box | Task lists |
Inline footnote ^[text] | stays as raw text | Named and repeated footnotes |
Arrows like --> become → | stay raw text; with GitHub flavored markdown they turn into —> | Arrows, tags and emoji |
| A tag in running text | its link leads out of the site — a bug in Quartz | Arrows, tags and emoji |
| Image with a size and an alt text | only one of the two | Images |
| Embedded PDF from page 2 | always starts on page 1 | Documents |
| Definition lists | exist in neither; HTML steps in | HTML in Markdown |
On top of that comes what deliberately looks different on this site than in Quartz out of the box — the callout colours, for instance. That does not stand here but in 5 – The design with the component in question.