As you all know, I write everything in Markdown, see my The Markdown Mindset. It would be nice, though, to also save metadata - information about the document - in the document, to make it searchable, but not to have it appear in the final output.
Turns out, MultiMarkdown (and other new Markdown processors) do support this. It’s easy.
Simply add the metadata to the top of a markdown file as follows:
Title: |
Subtitle: |
Project: |
Author: Hilton Lipschitz
Affiliation: Noverse LLC
Web: https://noverse.com
Date: June 18, 2012
Your first paragraph starts here
The metadata is just a set of key-value pairs, where the key is before the : and the value after. The keys can be anything you want them to be, although Fletcher Penney, creator of MultiMarkdown, has recommended some standard ones here. From what I can tell, adding your own makes no difference. So I do.
Also:
- It is recommended to end each line of the metadata with two spaces before the newline, so that older Markdown processors do not turn the metadata into a single line.
- The metadata block ends with the first blank line.
- You can have more than one value for a key on a new line, e.g. in my Call Note metadata header:
Called: Donald
In Conference: Huey
Duey
Louis
Project: Fake Disney App
Author: Hilton Lipschitz
Affiliation: Noverse LLC
Web: https://noverse.com
Date: June 11, 2012 16:48
Call notes start here
A search for called donald huey will find this document easily, even if Huey was quiet for the whole call and does not appear in the notes. Yet if I format this document for HTML or PDF using Marked, the metadata disappears. Just the way I want it.
I use this so much, I have TextExpander snippets that generate metadata block, fill in the dates for me, and place the cursor at the title line. Just New Document, type ;mmt (for MultiMarkdown Title) or ;mmc (for MultiMarkdown Call) and I have a new markdown document with the metadata block all set up and ready to go.