I need to paste and/or type an email address into a note without automatically adding a link to an email client. I just want a plain text version of the email address with no hyperlinks.
Things I have tried
I’ve tried typing in the address rather than pasting it. I’ve tried using the Links plugin to remove the link from the email without success. I’ve tried disabling all my plugins. I’ve tried pasting the link using cmd+V, cmd+shift+V, cmd+option+shift+V, and rightclick+Paste as plain text. Nothing works.
Is there a way I can simply type, say, [email protected] and have it just be plain text with no hyperlinks?
Yes, both do, although the address doesn’t render as normal text in preview mode. I was hoping for a solution that would render the text in the same font and format as the rest of the text where the address appears.
Not really. These particular notes will eventually end up getting exported as link-free public-facing documents and I’d prefer not to have to edit out backslashes and backticks.
It may be simpler to just write them in another app that doesn’t insist on automatically turning anything that looks like an email address into a hyperlink—like Drafts, e.g.—but I was hoping to keep everything together in Obsidian if I could.
This has definitely come up before. I thought there was a feature request to disable the mailto: link (or the link altogether), but I could be thinking of the opposite:
The translation of email-addresses into links is a pretty basic function of markdown, so I see just a few solutions:
mark it as code using backtics or similar markup
escape the address to make the pattern matching fail, like doing \@ or possibly @
use css to disable the link somehow, maybe by doing something like pointer-events: none, or to hide the formatting of the link
Also if using markup like <code> it would be possible with some extra styling to make it look like normal text.
But in the end, besides a potential CSS solution, you’ll need to do some edits before passing these documents on to the next system.
An interesting question then becomes who will push these links other than you? Are you not able to not click on them? Will it suffice to have CSS style the links as normal text?
I didn’t realize that translating email addresses into links was a basic function of markdown!
I’ve defaulted to doing most of my short-form writing in Obsidian, mostly because it’s always open. Most of what I write there is for my own consumption, but occasionally I write something that will get exported to a document I plan to share with others, and who often need link-free text.
I gather my solutions are to either write the docs in question in another app or to use backticks and edit them out of the exported documents (which isn’t all that hard, in truth).
OK. I found a workaround I can live with. If I open my Obsidian note in Marked 2 I can export it in several workable formats (PDF, RTF, DOC, ODF) sans any hyperlinks that aren’t in markdown format.
Bad wording on my behalf, as in it’s not declared as a link in the markdown standard, but many of the renderer engines I’ve worked with over the last decades have autodetected the email addresses as links, so I’ve come to think of it as kind of a de facto part of the standard.