HTML Entities are very useful for inserting symbols, for example I frequently use them to insert arrows (→, ⇄) or greek letters (α, γ, θ) into my notes.
They are rendered in “Reading View”, but not in “Editing View” with Live Preview mode, which is a shame.
HTML Entities should be rendered in “Editing View” with Live Preview.
I’m not sure whether is considered an HTML entity, but it’s certainly something HTML-y that does get rendered in reading mode but not in live preview. It’s also something that I use regularly, so this would be an appreciated feature.
I made a plugin that automatically replaces HTML entities with their actual characters. It’s not quite the same as rendering them in the live preview but maybe it could work anyway.
Sweet, I’ll give it a go!
Works perfectly, thanks!
On the Mac the sequence is to click Edit->Emoji & Symbols and then select the character you are looking for.
I would also heavily support the implementation of this feature. It doesn’t look very good (especially in comparison to other Markdown-editors) seeing things like Go to A → B.
The proposed solutions (plugins to replace an html-entity with its symbol counterpart or directly inserting the wanted symbol) is not the same. I want my Markdown-documents to be usable and the same on each application, so the html-entity should stay as is. Just the rendering should include it as well.
I’d also love to see this implemented. I use arrows and other HTML entities a lot, and it became muscle memory at this point, and rendering them in the live preview would make things much better for me.
There is no such function or solution, it would make certain activities much easier and shorten their time. Plugins are not as suitable for what we want to achieve, and using arrows and HTML elements is sometimes quite tiring. Continuously repeating the option of going to editing, then emojis and symbols, and finally searching for the necessary character.
The discussion seems to have devolved into a way to quickly choose and enter non-language characters like emojis and arrows.
The real problem is that Live Preview will render inline html tags, but not inline html character entities. I suppose this could be considered a feature request, but it seems like a bug to me.
To see what I mean, stick these two lines markdown in a note and compare Reading view with Live Preview editing mode:
This is <span style="color: red;"><em>a test</em></span> that uses inline HTML.
This is a test that uses HTML character entities—which is also inline HTML.
Because I think this is a bug, I’ve submitted a bug report here.
This is <span style="color: red;"><em>a test</em></span> that uses inline HTML.
This is a test that uses HTML character entities—which is also inline HTML.
and — are rendered as plain text. I expected to see the second line fully rendered as well.Live Preview should be rendering HTML character entities. Given that Live Preview does render inline HTML tags, it is unclear why Live Preview would not render HTML character entities (which can also be considered to be inline HTML).
I think that this discrepancy is either an oversight or a bug; it doesn’t feel like an intentional design decision. Hence, this bug report.
I reproduced this problem in the Obsidian Sandbox.
In Live Preview mode I expected to see the HTML character entities rendered to the correspond character glyph.
I saw the plain text HTML character entity, identitical to what I see in Source mode. The character entity was not rendered.
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.5.3
Installer version: v1.4.13
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 23.3.0: Wed Dec 20 21:28:58 PST 2023; root:xnu-10002.81.5~7/RELEASE_X86_64 23.3.0
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
I don’t think screenshots are needed. Let me know if they are needed and I’ll provide them
What a coincidence, I was facing the exact same issue today. Here are the things I tried:
However, none of that helped, so I’m reaching out here for any additional insights or solutions. If anyone has tackled this successfully, I’d greatly appreciate your advice!
Just ‘bumping’ this. I use the Omnivore plugin, and it escapes a number of characters such as apostrophes and forward slashes. The files generated appear fine in an app like Typora which recognises the entities and displays them as the relevant characters. However, Obsidian fails to recognise them in Live Preview which leads to the page being a mess and broken external links. I don’t think it’s Omnivore’s problem, in that HTML character entities can be legitimately used in Markdown.
Windows Powertoys is the best solution in my opinion. For example, just press “A” + “arrow key” to access “α”, much faster than emoji picker and more intuitive than HTML or ALT+ 4 digit code.
(Only works for Windows 11 though.)
