Feature request: enableing link_attributes extension for .md files by default

[jooyoungseo]

I understand that we can easily make links open in new browser tabs using [link](URL){target="_blank"} syntax as described on Yihui's blog post.

However, the link_attributes extension is only enabled for .Rmd files; we can't employ this method against .md files unless we enable the extension in the call to pandoc with +link_attributes.

I was wondering if we could enable this link_attributes extension globally for both .Rmd and .md files within blogdown package.

I am requesting this because there are some required .md files shipped with hugo themes, which are not working when replaced with .Rmd files.

For example, gcushen/hugo-academic has its own skeleton .md file for users to create their admin profiles including their bios:

"./content/authors/admin/_index.md"

Since my bio included some links that I wanted to open in new tabs, I appended {target="_blank"} to each of the link elements.

I found, however, that blogdown::build_site() did not work when I converted the _index.md file into a .Rmd format, which means I failed to secure a way to employ the link_attributes extension.

Please kindly consider this request.

[cderv]

Hi,

in Blogdown, there are three type of files .Rmd, .Rmarkdown, and .md. See this chapter in blogdown book Those files are not rendered with the same engine. Especially,

A plain Markdown post is rendered to HTML through Blackfriday (a package written in the Go language and adopted by Hugo).

So, [link](URL){target="_blank"} which I guess is a Pandoc related syntex won't work in md file. If you want target="_blank" links you should have a look into blackfriday configuration.

Some related resources on Hugo

• https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/how-to-target--blank-in-md/
• https://code.luasoftware.com/tutorials/hugo/how-to-create-link-with-target-blanks-in-hugo-markdown/

However, you can indeed use Rmd. I modified /content/authors/admin/_index.md to /content/authors/admin/_index.Rmd and added

See [Google](http://google.fr){target="_blank"}

when testing with blogdown::serve_site() I correcly got the correct html

<a href="http://google.fr" target="_blank">Google</a>

So it seems to work.

In summary, .md files are not rendered by pandoc so there is no enableing link_attributes to do here. To keep .md look into hugo / blackfriday configuration or use html directly. Otherwise Rmd should work.

Hope it helps.

[jooyoungseo]

Thank you very much for your instrumental and resourceful comments, @cderv!

Yes, I get the picture now.

And, I finally got the _index.Rmd to work as you described, probably there was an issue with my local machine (cache, etc.).

I am closing this issue to not bug anyone else.

Appreciatively,