Indentation without formatting to code block

Feature requests
,
1

Use case or problem

I am a law student, we use indentation to structure our reports. My problem is that indenting will turn text into code blocks that do not allow formatting. I need to add links etc. to indented text but keep the text readable.
There is a community plugin that allows indenting single lines and keeping the formatting. Yet what I need is the possibility to indent full paragraphs.

Proposed solution

Making multiple indentations possible without changing the text format e.g. through a plugin.

Current workaround (optional)

I use < br > but it really stops the flow. I have tried various css-Snippets, too, one from this forum. Sadly none of them worked. I am grateful for any ideas!

Related feature requests (optional)

2

In general you cannot produce documents that have paragraph specific indentation in Obsidian. You need to use Word etc. This is because documents are encoded with markdown which doesn’t offer paragraph indendation.

 

You can indent every paragraph using CSS.

.markdown-preview-view p {
  text-indent: 2em; 
}

This works in preview view (Ctrl + E or ⌘E). Achieving this in the live preview is probably very difficult or impossible. You can use splitted view (⌘ click the book icon) to have source and preview simultaneously. Having different styles for pdf exports is possible but difficult. This kind of work is usually done using Word.

3

Bullets will allow you to indent to different levels.

4

You could use blockquotes or one of the callous, and style it the way you want.

5

Thank you! Maybe I don’t understand what you mean, but when using bullet points and indenting, Obsidian still changes the formatting of the text to code.

6

This is a pretty easy fix I didn’t think of! Not perfect because I jump back to the first indentation after every line break, but very workable. Thank you!

1 Like
8

This may not be what you’re looking for but one work-around would be to write your text with your word processor app of choice and save it in the attachement folder of your vault. Then create a note and embed that file into the note (drag’n drop that file into your note). This allows almost instant recall of your note in its default app for editing or just reading.

9

You can also automatically create docx files based on the active note name.

 

The idea is that when you are done with your note then you can left click a button (Execute Code) to convert your note to docx OR you can execute a command palette command to do the same (Execute Code, Shell Commands and Enhancing Export). Enhancing Export has “export with previous” command which offers nearly similar functionality as Execute Code and Shell Commands.

10

Thank you for the detailed replies. This might come in handy, so far I need to be able to indent AND come back to the editable notes. I continuously notice my mistakes and need to fix them :slight_smile:

11

One more option is LaTeX and Overleaf