In one of the last sessions of our Blocks module, we’ll cover a bunch of other block types we haven’t managed to cover yet. These very much aren’t core to your everyday Notion use, but since the point of this course is to teach you everything you need to know to become a Notion expert, we are covering them in this lesson.
We’ll cover four block in this lesson; Table of Contents, Breadcrumb, Block equations, and Mermaid diagrams.
Copy link to headingTable of Contents
This actually used to be one of my favorite blocks in Notion until they introduced a newer ToC — as we explained in our Pages module, now every page can have a Table of Contents, which you can enable or disable from the three-dot top-right menu. This ToC will show up on the side of a page.
Before this feature was released, the only way to get a true, automatically generated Table of Contents was by adding the /toc block. And since this block is still available, we can use it, though personally I do prefer the new, built-in Table of Contents.
Whenever you add this block to a page, it will simply create a Table of Contents with links to all the headings and sub-headings from the page. You can move this block around as any other block, but you can’t manually modify its contents — they will be automatically updated each time you add or remove a heading from the Page.
ToC block GIF
Copy link to headingBreadcrumb
This block is pretty straightforward — it’s just the Breadcrumb menu you can already see at the top left of every page. This block just displays that same menu right within the page body.
[Breadcrumb menu vs Breadcrumb block screenshot side by side]
This might be helpful with navigating pages nested many levels deep in your Notion – and since there is usually more width to a page than there is to the Breadcrumb menu itself, you might see more of the menu within this block.
Copy link to headingBlock equations
This block is again not used too often, but can come very much in handy for anyone working with math. By typing /math, you’ll be able to spawn a dedicated block which will allow you to write equations with the use of the KaTeX language.
KaTeX is based on the popular LaTeX language used in many apps in academia. If you’re already familiar with LaTeX, here’s a specific list of all of the functions supported by KaTeX, and thus Notion.
If you’re unfamiliar with LaTeX altogether, but would like to write math equations, here’s a link to a very comprehensive documentation.
[GIF with math block]
Note: Notion also now supports inline math equations, so you can write raw KaTeX right within your paragraph block, and once you click Return, it should render nicely just like within a dedicated Math block.
Copy link to headingMermaid
Lastly, let’s talk talk about the Mermaid diagram block. This block used to be a wholly separate type of block, but these days it’s just a variation of the common Code block. Still, I do believe it is useful to mention this as an option.
Notion does not have a true, built-in graph feature(except Notion Database Charts, which we’ll talk about later), but we do have the option to create all sorts of diagrams, charts, and graphs using the Mermaid diagram language. This is a language syntax that lets you generate diagrams based on code-like text that then will be rendered as a visual diagram.
[Mermaid example GIF]
If you’d like to learn more about Mermaid, here’s a great introduction. I prefer to use third-party tools like Whimsical (since it’s just so much faster to create diagrams via a visual editor) and then embed my graph in Notion, but if Mermaid sounds like your jam, or you already know it, this is totally an option. Just use /mermaid to spawn this block.