Field guide / Rule 16 — From Markdown
A callout is an aside that wants to stand apart — a warning, a tip, a note to hold the reader for a second. Write one the way Markdown marks them, > [!warning] Careful, and a naive export leaves the [!warning] sitting there as literal text. Ours turns it into what you meant: a titled, colored box, set off from the prose around it.
The five base types — note, tip, important, warning, caution — come from GitHub-flavored Markdown, and editors like Obsidian pile a dozen more names on top: info, success, question, danger, bug, and so on. Rather than invent twenty box styles, we group them all onto the five color families: note (blue), tip (green), important (purple), warning (amber) and caution (red). So [!danger] and [!bug] both arrive as the red caution box, and [!hint] lands in the green tip family — the color that already carries the right meaning.
The word after the tag is your title, and it carries through: > [!tip] Shortcut becomes a box headed Shortcut, not a generic “Tip.” Leave the title off and the box takes the family’s default name. A fold marker — the trailing - or + some editors use to collapse a callout — is understood and simply dropped, since a printed page has nothing to fold.
Recognised callouts become their colored boxes; an unfamiliar type — one outside the five families and the names that fold onto them — degrades gracefully to a plain blockquote rather than breaking. Nothing is ever mangled or dropped.
Written as > [!warning] Careful, here is how the callout renders in a shared reading
page:
Careful
Double-check the figures before you send this out.
In short
A callout is meant to stand apart, so we make it: a titled, colored box. The twenty-odd names fold onto five color families, your custom title and fold markers are handled, and a type we don’t know simply falls back to a plain blockquote.
Want to see it on your own notes? Convert a document and the boxes come across with them.