Tbh, I’m not sure at what point it broke because I only switched to reading mode at the end of writing. I’ve checked and my Obsidian is up-to-date, and I don’t use any plugins. It looks like all the content is there, it’s just not parsing the data correctly for reading mode. Everything looks fine in the live preview mode.
All of these images are from live preview mode. I would expect to see the same thing in reading mode, just without being able to edit it. (idc about different spacing tbh)
Some of the content looks fine, such as the headings section and the ordered list, but the rest either looks very wrong or has completely vanished, and I’m guessing it has something to do with the random HTML tags everywhere. But they shouldn’t be picked up if they have the backticks around them…
(I can only put so many pictures here, I hope this shows enough)
Environment
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.6.7
Installer version: v1.5.12
Operating system: Windows 10 Home 10.0.22631
Login status: not logged in
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: on
RECOMMENDATIONS:
none
Additional information
I’ve put the screenshots above because it made more sense.
I think the fix is located in the parsing to the reading mode, so it doesn’t read HTML tags that are wrapped in back ticks.
Brand new user. This is something I’m wondering about too, and the thing I’ve burned a lot of cycles trying to solve up front (because I potentially have many hundreds of pages to bring in if I switch).
I looked in these forums, and Reddit etc for an answer: why are reading and edit modes so different? And why are imports from other platforms, HTML etc not as pasted? (always have an extra blank line inserted between each line of text).
I’ve tested HTML import and pastes from a few other platforms and they all are messed up. It seems really difficult and tedious to fix, even with an editing plugin. What’s the rationale here?
Its annoying for me as well, when in Reading Mode all my extra lines are just getting cut-off and the whole content is being shrunk down. I usually put the empty extra lines for the content to look better, but in Reading Mode everything looks compressed and clumsy.
From a technical view, preview view and edit mode (source view, live preview) are not the same, exactly because both modes use different code. Reading mode is just a wrapper for markdown. Basically, Markdown is source mode.
What you see is not what you get because it’s markdown under the hood. Example, Ms Word is not markdown, so you get what you see.
I agree both views aren’t perfect, but this is the best you can get, from machine code. Otherwise there wouldn’t be differences.
Summary
My advice is to get used to preview view and use live preview view just to edit your notes.
This thread is becoming a bit of catch-all. The OP was likely encountering a parsing problem in reading view and the rest is unrelated to their post but related to the title.
I would not say that Live Preview and Reading mode are very different, but there are differences.
Most of the differences are due to fact that Reading view contains the HTML output of the whole processed document whereas LP is, at its core, a plain text editor with enhancements to make it look-like the rendered document.
I think LP can be improved further, but there are both technical limits to what can be done and also design decision that we make.
For example, in markdown, extra lines in the source of the document are removed in the rendered HTML. If we were to remove/hide them from LP, we would introduce the problem of those lines being hard to discover in LP and also cause a jump in the document viewport when they are expanded.
Some problems are very hard. For example we spent a lot of time faking the list indentation in LP and it’s still not perfect.
