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Published in July 2023

When starting to write content in Markdown with Frontmatter for this little site powered by Astro framework using Content Collections, I quickly noticed that writing one or two sentences in the Frontmatter section would create ugly long lines which were becoming difficult to work with.

What I didn’t realise at first: Frontmatter essentially is YAML. I had thought it only allows basic keys and values, not more complex YAML data structures too.

So I’ve looked into this and found out that Astro uses Remark for Markdown support and the remark plugin to support Frontmatter:

“This package is a unified (remark) plugin to add support for YAML, TOML, and other frontmatter.”

The “and other” apparently also includes JSON as data format for Frontmatter. But we’re not interested in that for now.

In case you don’t know what any of this is about:

”Frontmatter is a metadata format in front of content. It’s typically written in YAML and is often used with markdown.” [sic!]

When trying to find out how I could split Frontmatter data across a couple of lines, to make longer titles and summaries easier to read, I found a post on Stack Overflow: How do I break a string in YAML over multiple lines? There are NINE (or 63, depending how you count) different ways to write multi-line strings in YAML.

Thanks to the helpful answer on Stack Overflow, I can now write longer titles like this:

sourceTitle: >
    ‘I want to open a window in their souls’:
    Haruki Murakami on the power of writing simply

(This example is taken from on of the first posts here.)

The magic here happens with the >. I found this option looks like it should work best for me.

(Prompt for Craiyon to generate the header image: “Illustrate web programming and special text formatting for YAML language in a source code editor.” / Style: Drawing.)