Referring to sections in pandoc's markdown

[manolomartinez]

When I need to refer to a section (if --number-sections is set) I do

# My section\label{mysection}

Here I'm referring to section \ref{mysection}.

This works, but I wonder if there's

1. A way to leverage auto_identifiers, so that I don't have to create my own labels.
2. A pure-markdown way to refer to them, instead of LaTeX's \ref.

Thanks for any pointers.

[badumont]

You don't have to use \label. By default, pandoc will automatically add \label{my-section} at the end of the heading. To set the identifier explicitely, you can write e.g. `# My section {#myid}`. Pandoc by itself can only create hyperlinks to your section (e.g. `see [the preceding section](#my-section)`). To refer to it by section number, you can either insert raw LaTeX (if you only export to that format) or use pandoc-crossref.

[manolomartinez]

Thanks!

[badumont]

Thanks! That's what I gather from the docs, but, e.g., if I have a section called "The Signal-Processing Aim of Cognition", referring to it with `\ref{the-signal-processing-aim-of-cognition}` produces "??" in the resulting pdf.

It should work (at least in pandoc 3.6.1). Did you compile the LaTeX file twice? Did you get a warning? To know if the argument of \ref is right, it suffices to inspect the resulting LaTeX file. Personally I always set the identifiers manually so that they are more straightforward to refer to and less verbose.

[jgm]

Small note: if you use --file-scope, then something will be added to the identifiers indicating the filename they came from (since otherwise we could have conflicts). To see what identifiers pandoc is generating, you can use -t native.

[manolomartinez]

Thanks both!