As I understand it, one of the main goals of Obsidian is to preserve data across time (and formats). I think that block indentation is largely seen as a stylistic property, and for many documents it is. But there are a class of important documents (legal, engineering, etc.) where indentation is just as important, or even more important to interpretation than bold, italics, quote, or bullets. Being able to preserve block indenting of paragraphs is an important aspect for a not insignificant number of document types.
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Would this be better in feature request? Maybe they actually could add this in at some point.
Well shoot, I thought that I did haha.
If you do open a FR, please read and follow the FR template and search before posting.
I don’t understand what you are asking
How about a feature-rich, new theme?
See here
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That truly does look amazing. Unfortunately, I am making an argument for indentation of a whole text block, not just a leading indent on the first sentence.
Yeah, that’s how Obsidian’s markdown specification works. And indeed, indentation is only available as a styling element.
With my theme, you could split sentences through new lines and create this way, all the text blocks you need to indent.
I imagine this editing would require a lot of post process work on your side and therefore defeat the goal of working with the kind of documents you’ve to deal with everyday.
In previous versions, I offered automatic indentation of paragraphs. So all you had to do was to click a simple toggle to auto indent paragraphs, without extra formatting tags. Still, you’d have to add line breaks as my auto indentation only works with new paragraphs.
I can re-introduce auto indentation of common text (excluding headers) again, on request.
I use lists for indentation. Then you can get CSS to hide the bullets.
Words fail me how much I want to be able to indent paragraphs. Tried many a CSS ‘solution’, they indent everything that isn’t a bullet list. I abhor markdown (and general web) standard of double line break for a new paragraph. It takes more space while making the text less, rather than more, readable. It also takes away the normal use of double line break in publishing. It’s my only true gripe with Obsidian, but I’d probably jump ship for it if ever there’s an app that has paragraph indent, while having local files in non-proprietary format.
I wouldn’t change editors.
You could try keeping your bulleted lists then export to docx and then apply some macro that transforms them into indented paragraphs and then optionally print from there or whatever you want with the material.
Are you writing legal documents within Obsidian? If I was then as a long-time legal assistant, I would be using the heading structure rather than an indent structure if writing in Markdown. And possibly numbered lists where appropriate. But Markdown is really not the appropriate medium to be writing legal agreements in.
But as far as the legal interpretation of an agreement being affected by indents, that is not likely to be the case. In fact, most lengthy legal agreements will include the clause that the interpretation is not affected by headings or structure of the agreement.
I wonder if callouts might possibly solve your indentation problem. They are very flexible, and you can nest callouts inside of each other. But I think this would be a very cumbersome solution for a legal agreement.
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