Make it easier to create anchor links to sub-sections of an article
As a product designer/documentation writer, I want to be able to easily link to a particular section within an article that is hosted on my Zendesk support site – for example, from release notes, from in-app error messages, from other support site articles.
Right now I have to manually add name attributes to headers, which is annoying and time consuming given how often I have to do this.
One solution could be to auto-generate name attributes for all h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 based on the text within the heading tag. e.g. opening tag of <h1>Integrating with Zendesk</h1> becomes <h1 name="integrating-with-zendesk"> upon article save.
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Official comment
Hey All,
We've just released 2 updates to linking in the article editor. Firstly, you'll be able to link to any heading within a document. Just select the text you want to link, click the link icon and click Headings. You can then select any heading in the document to link to. You'll also be able to link to any anchor tag with a name attribute.
Secondly, we've made it easier to link to other articles. If you go to the Help Center articles tab, you'll be able to search for and link to other articles in the same Help Center
It's not an auto-generated table of contents, but that's something we'll keep as feedback and will look at ways we can potentially add it.
Thanks!
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+99. I think there's already a request for this somewhere, and I know that ZD is aware of the issue.
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That's good Jonathan, I couldn't find one but I'm not surprised it's come up before
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Any update from Zendesk around this ability?
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I, too, would like to know if this feature will be released soon.
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are you looking for something like this https://support.teachable.com/hc/en-us/articles/219891027
(try Jump Ahead box)
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Would be helpful when linking to information in other articles in Zendesk.
It is easier to show where to read if you can link to the chapter directly.
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Hi All,
I appreciate the feedback. We've got requests around anchors and tables of contents for the Editor. I've recently taken over the Article Editor and I've tried to prioritize small scale improvements to the Editor every quarter. For example, we just released Headings and Video Embedding for videos. I will take this request around anchors and tables of contents into account as we continue to make improvements in the coming quarters. The next feature we have in the queue for implementation of the editor is linking between articles. I don't have a timeline for when we'll get to this feature yet but we are looking to make overall improvements every quarter.
Thanks!
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Excellent! Another easy win would be the code block and code span, which are already available in the ticket editor.
Why can't you simply use the same editor?
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Any news about this one? I really hope so.. struggling with putting in anchor points to the messy code window.. could be so much easier.
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+1 this feature. Need to be able to make Table of Contents in articles. Atlassian Confluence pretty much can create these automatically.
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Thanks for adding your voice, Mike.
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Hi Ryan,
Love the update!! Just one feedback, it seems like the link takes you straight to the content and doesn't include the headings. For example:
It would be great if it could be made to something like this
Cheers,
Karlina
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Hey Karlina,
Not sure I'm following 100% from the screenshots. But I think you're saying you've got a link the "Performance Status" heading at the top of the document, and when you click it the browser actually scrolls past the "Performance Status" heading to the content below it in the document. This is browser behavior and is partly dependent on the height of the browser window. So different user may have a different experience. For example, here's a screenshot of it on my machine and "Performance Status" is visible.
Let me know if I misunderstood your post. Thanks!
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Hi Ryan,
Thank you for the speedy update.
You are right!! I've tried adjusting the height and all seems good now.
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Hello,
While I appreciate the updates, the original use case of this post has not been addressed.
Essentially what should happen is, every time you create a heading (h1, h2, etc.) in an article, it should immediately be assigned a corresponding anchor. So if my heading reads "Get Started" a link should be created for subdomain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/article-name/get-started/
GitHub does this really well for their README.md files, every heading that you create receives a corresponding anchor tag.
Thanks for reading!
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Hi everyone,
Is there a way to link to a heading in a different article?
I'm happy to enter the code myself, but I don't know how.
Cheers,
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Hello Rich,
That's possible!
It's basically
(https://your.domain.com)/path/to/article#header-id. So to get that URL you could do this:The description below assumes that you also have internal links to the headers in the article. If that's not the case skip it and continue in the P.S.
First look in the target article, what the link to the header is. It will be something like
#h_4b03f065-174e-4006-bd66-e9d6817248f4.
Now go to the source article, create a link to the target article. Then switch to the URL tab again. It will show something like
/hc/en-us/articles/360003861679.
Now combine the two like this /hc/en-us/articles/360003861679#h_4b03f065-174e-4006-bd66-e9d6817248f4.
With kind regards,
Sebastiaan
Sparkly ⭐P.S.
In case you don't have internal links in the article, Zendesk didn't create the ID for you. In that case you can add one manually, by editing the source code:
Now find the header and add an ID:
Now you can use this id in your URL
/hc/en-us/articles/360003861679#alderaan. -
Thanks Sebastiaan,
That is so helpful. Much appreciated.
Cheers,
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@... - I am having the same experience as Karlina with the links. When clicking it jumps past the header of the section and goes directly to displaying the content. I have tried this on my laptop as well as with an external monitor. I've also tried in different browsers, zooms, and with/without the bookmark bar displayed. The only time I am able to see the header displayed when clicking the link is when I am at 50% zoom (everything half sized) in Chrome which isn't really a normal use case for anyone viewing the KB. I'll include a screenshot of what I see when clicking the link and what ideally the result would be when clicking the link. Any advice here would be appreciated - thank you!
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Hey @...,
I definitely agree that being at 50% zoom is not ideal. I'm wondering, is the heading being obscured by Agent Navigation bar? If so, you can collapse it with the small handle "handle" in the center.
If not, do you have an example I could see in the wild?
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Hi there
I'm trying to add a link to a heading within an article but it's merging 2 headings instead of allowing me to just select one. In the bottom example I'm trying to select the bottom heading but it's automatically highlighting both. These 2 headings are separated in the article by fairly lengthy paragraphs so it's not like they are directly under each other.
What is the cause of this?
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