Markdown citation syntax not highlighted correctly

[daijiang]

Hi,
I am writing a paper with markdown using VSCode. But the citations were not highlighted correctly.

Any idea how to fix this?
Thanks!

[Lemmingh]

Do you mean shortcut reference link?

Such things require semantic information, which cannot be achieved with TextMate grammar.

I think Semantic Highlighting is the way out. But as discussed somewhere before, we need to get a Markdown processor that provides very precise source mapping.

---

In case you're interested in VS Code's architecture of syntax highlighting:

• Tokenization overhaul microsoft/vscode#77140

[daijiang]

It is not shortcut reference link since [@citationKey] it is regular text.
I think it just requires to update the match pattern to highlight. For example, in the attached screenshot, line 2 works (highlighted) but line 3 was not highlighted (because of a space after ;).
Thanks!

[yzhang-gh]

Those [@text] in line 1 and line 2 happen to get highlighted because VS Code thinks they are reference links.
There is no concept of citations in Markdown. So the result is as expected.

[daijiang]

So basically there is no way to get all citations correctly highlighted in VS Code?

[yzhang-gh]

You can use Highlight extension.
Of course a little knowledge about regular expressions is required. Probably you can try \[@[^\]]*\].

[daijiang]

Thanks! I'll check that out.