When using Obsidian on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, it should be possible to write out notes using iPadOS’s handwriting-to-text system, Scribble. It mostly is! There is one annoying bug though: when you try to insert text, it adds a line break which you can’t remove without a keyboard.
Steps to reproduce
On an iPad with an Apple Pencil, press and hold the pencil on a location in a paragraph where you want to insert some text. It will push the text apart and add a grey box to write more text in.
Expected result
It should insert the text, and then after a few seconds of not writing, close the gap up into a paragraph again, with the new text inserted.
Actual result
When the grey insert box closes in obsidian, it leaves behind a paragraph break, instead of closing up the space around the insert.
Environment
Operating system:
Debug info:
SYSTEM INFO:
Operating system: ios 15.6.1 (Apple iPad)
Obsidian version: 1.3.2 (69)
API version: v0.15.9
Login status: not logged in
Live preview: on
Legacy editor: off
Base theme: dark
Community theme: Minimal
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 7
Plugins enabled: 7
1: Templater v1.14.3
2: Minimal Theme Settings v5.3.2
3: Smart Typography v1.0.18
4: Dice Roller v8.6.9
5: Excalidraw v1.7.22
6: Style Settings v0.4.12
7: Dataview v0.5.46
Has there been any progress on this or is there a bug tracker or something? Obsidian’s lacklustre handwriting support is one of my only complaints about it. It would be really helpful if it could come up to the normal standard of iPad apps.
Occasionally we get a reply that a bug will be fixed next version. But in general, there are no estimates, and no public bug tracker.
Plus, just adding my reply that I experience this same behaviour. No plugins. And it seems a bit random. It doesn’t always add a paragraph break, and it doesn’t seem 100% dependent on position, line width, or timing. I wonder why. I tried reading through a few developer docs trying to see if there are any obvious clues, but can’t find much.
I’m on 1.4.6 and this still happens, but I think I figured out the issue.
It seems like scribble is assuming a lined paper overlay. If I write in one level line, and continue writing on that same plane with natural line breaks, the issue goes away.
Scribble seems to be tracking your input across the iPad screen as one page in a notebook.
I think it is a bug yes. I’ve never experienced it in any other app. And I can’t recreate this fix. Sometimes it makes a new line even when I’m part way through a word.
And in other apps, I can go all over the place with the alignment, and it doesn’t happen.
I’ve also been bitten by this issue. It makes the scribble feature nearly unusable with Obsidian. Shame because I was really hoping to be able to make my iPad my primary PKM device and it seems a physical keyboard is practically a necessity when interacting with Obsidian on iPad.
I’m also experiencing issues. I just want to do plaintext entry using the Apple Pencil scribble text inline. It works in other notes apps pretty seamlessly but on obsidian the pencil taps make the cursor move unpredictably.
If anyone has any settings or suggestions to make this usable please let me know.
I’m encountering a number of issues trying to use Scribble within Obsidian under iOS. (I had assumed “scribble” was just “scribble” – not something that varied between apps–but I’m seeing radically worse operation within Obsidian than within other apps (e.g., Apple Mail).
It is almost impossible to scratch out a word using the pencil–by scratching or scribbling over it. In Apple Mail, it recognizes a “scratch this out” motion, but in Obsidian it tortuously attempts to figure out a letter or group of letters. It refuses to scratch anything out. You can scribble ferociously over a word and Obsidian will always give you something like an “M” (veritical scribbles) or a W (horizontal scribbles) or other strange interpretive results.
Using the vertical line stroke to separate or join words most often inserts a lower-case “el” – even when you hugely overdraw the stroke–from way above to way below the line.
In bulleted lists, it is more difficult to get an initial capital on the first word. Works naturally in other apps (mixed capitalization, although still not ideal) but is torturous in Obsidian bullet outlining. Have to draw the initial cap, then pause until it converts to text, then finish the rest of the word to get it workable.
So I was surprised by this as I assumes scribble within Obsidian was something the operating system provided and would “just work” the same way it does in other iOS apps… but my experiments show a radical difference where in Obsidian it is almost unworkable for taking reliable notes in a live setting. (You spend half your time listening to the presentation and the other half of the time distracted by trying to corral the written text to do what it should.)
I wonder if it might be somehow related to the editor’s underlying structure not being just a big text field.
I’m thinking this might be the case too. It seems as if there are factors in the obsidian use of scribble which confuse it and wind up degrading the experience.
At present, I’m going to be resorting to entering my scribble content in another app, then pasting it over into Obsidian. Painful, but less painful than living with all the glitches when scribbling directly into Obsidian.
After some experimentation, it seems that scribble in Obsidian on iOS behaves much better within a page without front matter.
I created a blank “scratch” page without any front matter or headings and can use Scribble fine on that page. It behaves about the same as it does in other apps. Can then copy-and-paste to the destination page location.
Seems to support the theory that scribble performance degrades due to the preceding markdown formatting.
I just tried Scribble in Obsidian for the first time in quite a while and it seems much better behaved now (in Obsidian 1.7.6 on iPadOS 18.1). The only issue I’m seeing is that I have to restart Obsidian to dismiss Scribble, but I believe there’s a separate report for that. The note I tested in had properties, but only minimally — at first just a single empty one, and then I added an alias.