Obsidian doesn’t allow certain symbols (including question marks) due to Windows ‘reserved characters’.
A nice little workaround for this is to use a special character that closely resembles the question mark, the interrobang or CJK question mark:
‽ or ?
Since we obviously wouldn’t want to copy and paste the new symbol every time we want to use it, I’ll give a brief walkthrough on how to create a custom keyboard shortcut using AutoHotKey.
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Install AutoHotKey, then right click on your desktop and select New > AutoHotKey Script. Name the script file whatever you like.
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Right click on the script file and select ‘Edit Script’
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Choose your keyboard shortcut using this table.
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Use the following format in the ‘Edit Script’ window.
In this example we’ll use “Ctrl + Shift + /”, since it’s just adding a “Ctrl” to the normal keys you use for the question mark.
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Save this file and double click it to run the script.
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Because we like to go above and beyond here at Obsidian Forums, you can follow this brief video on how to get your script(s) to autolaunch on startup.
How to Launch AutoHotkey Scripts At Startup (4k) - YouTube
That’s it! Don’t you let anything in this world stop you from asking the important questions.
Note: Here are some nice alternatives I found for other reserved characters as well.
꞉, 〳
Here is a full list of special characters, and here is a more complete tutorial for all things AutoHotKey