Field guide / Rule 18 — From Markdown
Wiki-style editors — Obsidian, Foam, and others — have their own way to drop a picture into a note: the double-bracket embed, ![[chart.png]]. It’s quick to type, but it isn’t standard Markdown, so a plain converter renders it as broken text. We recognise the embed, rewrite it to a real image, and place the picture in your Word document where you meant it to go.
![[chart.png]] is wiki shorthand for “put this image here.” We rewrite it to the standard Markdown form behind the scenes and embed the picture, so what was a fragile bit of vault-only syntax becomes an ordinary image in the exported document. It works for the usual image file types — the extension is how we know it’s a picture and not a note.
These embeds let you write text after a pipe — usually a size, sometimes a label. We read it as the image’s alt text, so ![[chart.png|Figure 1]] arrives as a picture described as “Figure 1.” That keeps the document accessible and gives the image a name a reader — or a screen reader — can use.
Image embeds become embedded pictures; a note embed — ![[Some note]], with no image extension — can’t be transcluded without your vault, so it steps down to plain text instead of breaking into a missing-image icon.
Written as ![[chart.png|Figure 1]] — the pipe becomes the image’s alt text — here is the
embedded picture in a shared reading page:
In short
A wiki-style image embed, ![[chart.png]], becomes a real embedded picture in your document, and the pipe after the name becomes its alt text. Only a note embed — which needs the vault we don’t have — steps down to plain text, and it does so gracefully instead of breaking.
Want to see it on your own notes? Convert a document and your images come across with them.