I am trying to use common symbols, like arrows, in my text. I use markdown in many other things and have gotten used to → and other shorthands that seem to always render correctly in markdown. In Obsidian it seems to do nothing.
Searching this forum, searching google, everything tells me to change font or an install an extension, but it feels like a markdown thing that works everywhere should work here too.
I don’t use HTML in markdown unless I really need to.
Why not install Typing Transformer and make rules so: _ and > typed one after the other would yield →.
You can add a million of these to the plugin.
The downside is that it is an Obsidian-only solution. You can install some app that makes text expansions OS wide.
A lot of this markdown eventually makes it to a wiki or devops readme, so I want to stay universal, and → works everywhere else.
Is there a way to turn on html for obsidian?
FYI, raw HTML symbol entities are rendered in “Reading” view, but are not rendered in “Live Preview” editing mode. However, if you surround the symbol in HTML tags (e.g. <span>), the symbol is rendered in “Live Preview” editing mode.
Source editing mode:
Live Preview editing mode:
Reading view:
Hope this helps…
Using a html entity isn’t true markdown any more than using some extension to insert the corresponding unicode character. My take, so far, has been to either use the inbuilt translation from my mac, or using the search unicode character plugin. Using Typing transformer seems like an interesting option too.
And as long as they insert unicode characters, you’re not actually relying on that extension other than that is one of the way to type characters not being displayed on your keyboard. Which in turn completes the circle, as that is what using html entities also enables you to do…
Nice little work around. It seems like some html entities are rendered but symbols like this aren’t.
Doesn’t seem like there’s a way to change that. Found an old bug report and threads etc using some new keywords I’ve learned from the responses. Appreciate it.
Just for the fun of it, I tried a dataview variant to utilise the reading mode renderer, and it worked too:
`="→"`
Would I use it? Most likely not. But it’s working, albeit both these variants I’m seeing as less useful than some way to insert the actual unicode character. YMMV.