Horizontol rule stopped working, re: em dash

Just today, the feature to create a horizontal rule from three dashes stopped working, because Obsidian now automatically creates an em dash from the first two dashes: —-

I can create the horizontal rule from three underscores, but cannot do it from dashes.

This note and this note from a few years ago report the same issue. They both fixed by turning off “smart punctuation” in iOS. But I’m not in iOS; I’m in MacOS Sonoma 14.2.1. I’m in Obsidian 1.6.7.

I turned off “use smart quotes and dashes” in MacOS system settings >> Keyboard, but that didn’t fix it. It’s also not doing it in other apps; only Obsidian.

Doesn’t appear to be related to any plugins, 'cuz the behavior is the same in a sandbox vault with no plugins installed.

Is there a setting that’s changed? Am I missing something?

You could check in System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input → Input sources as well.

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Thanks for this. Yeah, I do have smart quotes and dashes turnd off, and I’m not getting the em dash thing in any other apps. Just Obsidian.

I know there’s been a recent update to Obsidian - a few weeks ago. Is this possibly a setting that mt hv changed? It’s only happening in Obsidian.

I wish em-dashes worked for me! Obsidian is the only app I use on macOS that doesn’t convert -&- to —…

That’s ironic. I can’t get mine to stop it and you can’t get yours to do it. Weird.

One thing you can try, it will only take a minute if you have a newer mac, is creating a test user account or switching to another user account if there’s one on the device already. Open Obsidian in that and make a test vault or open the Sandbox.

How’s the dash behavior in the second account?

If it’s fine, you’ll know it’s something in/about your main account causing the issue.

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From the Obsidian menu bar, is Edit > Substitutions > Smart Dashes ticked?

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Good find! I never noticed this menu entry before.

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That’s grayed out for me. Never noticed or looked at that before though.

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Hello.

Some menu items are greyed out if the current area of focus cannot use those specific menu items.

Not at a Mac to be able to check this, but do you see a difference if a file is loaded in the editor and the cursor is in the file, making it active? (Might be barking up the wrong tree. Got the idea from this link: Linguistic Focus - #5 by anon56864026 - Scrivener for macOS - Literature & Latte Forums)

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You found the right tree. :deciduous_tree::dog2: Menu shows only what is possible with the currently selected input option:

  • Reading view: everything greyed out
  • Editing view and cursor in edior: everything selectable
  • Cursor in Search input box: some items greyed out.
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:dog: :evergreen_tree::palm_tree::deciduous_tree: :paw_prints: :+1:

Thanks for checking this; not been back to a Mac yet to see things for myself.

Hope it resolves the issue for the users in this thread.

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Belated thanks! This sorted out em-dashes for me and gives me hope that there might be a way to implement the text features of Apple Intelligence soon…?

This worked!

Thnx

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