I’m on Obsidian 1.9.6 for Windows 11, Minimal theme with Style‑Settings but no CSS snippets and Strict line breaks OFF. Live‑Preview has started doing something destructive: whenever my cursor is adjacent to a manual <br> tag and I type any character (letter, number, punctuation, even a space), Live‑Preview instantly deletes a <br>—usually the one just before the cursor, sometimes the one after. It never happens in Source mode, and Backspace / Delete / Paste do not trigger it. If I switch to Source, insert the extra <br> tags I need, then flip back to Live‑Preview, I get one “safe” keystroke; after that the deletion cycle resumes. Worse, Live‑Preview now won’t even let me add a second consecutive <br>—I type it, but it never appears. The bug is trivial to reproduce:|
Line A<br><br>Line B
1 ) Place the cursor after “A” in Live‑Preview 2 ) Type any character → one <br> disappears. Repeat: each keystroke removes the next <br>. I can reproduce this in a brand‑new vault with Safe‑Mode ON, so it seems core‑editor related rather than plugin‑specific, but for the record my production vault runs a minimal set (Auto Link Title, Commander, Dataview, Git, Markdown Table Editor, Tag Wrangler, Tasks, Templater, Minimal Theme Settings, Style Settings, etc.) and no regex or formatter plugins. I have tried resetting theme settings, disabling make.md, toggling Strict line breaks, and updating from 1.9.5→1.9.6—no luck. Live‑Preview simply eats <br> tags on every keystroke.
This matters because I’ve spent a year building a clinical‑documentation workflow that relies on manual <br> spacing; we rolled it out to the rest of the therapy staff two weeks ago—right as this bug surfaced—and the entire department is now three weeks behind on notes. I’m genuinely worried about job security if I can’t find a fix; the timing couldn’t look worse. It literally looks like it wasn’t working before this but it WAS and for MONTHS. Has anyone else on 1.9.6 reproduced this? Could a core plugin (Page Preview, Backlinks, etc.) be interfering with HTML handling, or is this a new Live‑Preview regression? Short of editing solely in Source mode or abandoning <br> tags, is there any workaround? Any confirmation or guidance would be hugely appreciated.