Reading: Fail to render correctly Multi-Paragraph List Items when separated with lines that contain 3+ spaces

Bug reports
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1

The standard 4-space indentation syntax for multi-list paragraphs in Obsidian MD appears to be broken, so is incompatible with any notes written in standard Markdown.

Note: This issue is unrelated to several previous posts about multi-paragraph list items.
These posts were about live-preview mode and general confusion around multi-paragraph lists.

Steps to reproduce

I recommend using a mono-space font in source-editor mode to help locate and input the correct number of blank-spaces.

Use the following Obsidian MD source code, character-for-character including spaces, which are substituted here by ␣ — so make sure to replace these after copy-pasting:

Here is a list with nested paragraphs:
- The first item.
␣␣␣␣
␣␣␣␣A nested paragraph.
␣␣␣␣
- The second item.

Expected result

When rendered, the first list item contains two separate paragraphs, with a paragraph break and matching indentation — ironically, the above syntax works perfectly well here in the Obsidian forum, as you would expect from most Markdown renderers:

Here is a list with correct nested paragraphs:

  • The first item.

    A correct nested paragraph.

  • The second item.

Actual result

Obsidian just ignores the nested paragraph break — I haven’t provide screenshots, because it was trivial to visually recreate the issue here:

Here is a list with broken nested paragraphs:

  • The first item. A broken nested paragraph.
  • The second item.

Environment

See Details Below

Note: I reproduced this bug in the sandbox, as required.

SYSTEM INFO:
	Obsidian version: v1.7.7
	Installer version: v1.7.7
	Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 24.1.0: Thu Oct 10 21:02:27 PDT 2024; root:xnu-11215.41.3~2/RELEASE_X86_64 24.1.0
	Login status: not logged in
	Language: en
	Insider build toggle: off
	Live preview: off
	Base theme: adapt to system
	Community theme: none
	Snippets enabled: 0
	Restricted mode: on

RECOMMENDATIONS:
	none

Additional information

There are a few ways to produce the correct output in Obsidian MD, shown below.
However, none of these are the “canonical” syntax; the 4-space indentation above is the standard syntax, yet the only one that is broken in Obsidian — it is widely supported so is a critical compatibility issue.

I realise that I have the following “workarounds”, however I have 100s of existing Markdown notes in Obsidian that use the standard list paragraph syntax, and I am not prepared to reformat all them to use less widely-compatible syntax — and I definitely won’t be using <br><br>, as we all know this is not semantically equivalent to an actual <p> break.

See Examples Below

First, is with double-space ␣␣ indentation:

Here is a list with correct nested paragraphs:
- The first item.
␣␣
␣␣A correctly nested paragraph.
␣␣
- The second item.

Alternatively, zero-indentation on the blank lines but 2–4 spaces of indentation before the paragraph text:

Here is a list with correct nested paragraphs:
- The first item.

␣␣A correctly nested paragraph.

- The second item.

Here is a list with correct nested paragraphs:
- The first item.

␣␣␣␣A correctly nested paragraph.

- The second item.
2

Thanks for the report. You didn’t mention that the bug happens in reading mode.

This is a bug of the markdown processor we use for reading mode (among several others). Someday, we will update/change it.

1 Like
3

Great thank you!
And yes, it is a reading mode rendering issue.