Differentiate CJK characters by language

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages share some overlapping characters (CJK characters) with similar but often different glyphs. For example, the “same” character may have an additional stroke in a language which is absent in another language. However, in Obsidian a font chosen in “Text font” menu will shadow the font after it. Therefore, a character will be displayed in the first font even if it’s in the language of the second font.

Proposed solution

It seems that Obsidian is insensitive to language currently. Maybe let the user designate a chunk of words to be a certain language?

Setting a note to be in a certain language will not be ideal since at least for me, I often use English and two CJK languages in the same file…

Current workaround (optional)

None

2

Related or possible duplicate: Pages in multiple languages

I don’t know enough about how these things work to know if designating languages is enough to solve the problem or if it’s a font issue.

1 Like
3

That post is about translation whereas this post is about fonts.

You made me realize that this can be solved by adding the functionality of being able to choose an arbitrary fonts for a chunk of text in a note, as in for example, OneNote. Although more general, this may actually be an easier way…

4

You could use HTML, like:

<div class="japanese">
Japanese text…
</div>

And write a CSS snippet that sets a different font for .japanese.

Unfortunately you won’t be able to use Markdown inside the div — only HTML — which could be a big downside.