Why am I Getting Red Text After Tabbing?

[jvh600]

When I hit “tab” in front of the quoted line, it changes to the colour that seems to be reserved for code entries. Why? (See attachments).

JV

[ryanjamurphy]

Note: please categorize these kinds of questions in #help—it will save me two clicks for each thread.

An indented line is another way of indicating a code block. You may want to use blockquote instead in this case, as in start a line with > , as this is a quote.

Total aside: I gave a TEDx talk almost a decade ago arguing that the question should be “who do you want to be?”, not “what.”

[menatarp]

Where should we go to change this so that the font stays the same?

Is there a way to set tab to just create a start-of-paragraph indent?

[RikD]

Request a change of the CommonMark standard?
Don’t think they will go for it though…

[menatarp]

So just to make sure I understand–there’s no way to change the font for tabbed text just by going into the CSS?

[Dor]

Tabbed text will always be treated as code rather than text, even if you alter the CSS so that they look the same.

It’s just an example of the primacy of code in markdown. Ditto ‘text editors’ are code editors rather than text editors.

It’s a different evolutionary line to word processors, notepads, two pane outliners etc, such as Scrivener and most programs for writers.

And that is different again to to the line of wiki type outliners such as Workflowy, Dynalist, and now Roam.

[menatarp]

Yeah, I understand that, but since I don’t use Obsidian for writing code, I’m just trying to get the tabbed text to be visually indistinct, regardless of what the editor recognizes it as.

[Dor]

afaics, that ought to be possible but you’d probably have to modify the CSS itself.

What you can’t do with CSS is change the way the editor treats the text. I don’t know if anything is hard coded that can’t be modified with CSS.

In general I agree with you. People who don’t write code are likely to prefer options to turn code instructions off.

And many people who write text would prefer a range of instructions for text that don’t appear in markdown.

Plaintext is good but that doesn’t mean markdown is the best implementation.

[changist]

I have the same question. Read a few similar posts, figured out what CommonMark is, and still don’t have an answer, but i may be able to improve the question!

Is there a better convention for separating paragraphs vertically while indented?

Preferably

• without resorting to bulletpoints
• or numbered lists

[ryanjamurphy]

@changist

separating paragraphs vertically

I guess my question is: what are you trying to achieve by doing this?

[dajolens]

Slightly different question, but it fits the topic here, I think. This thread has helped me so far to understand why tabbed text is displayed in red.

But what exactly changes by the setting “Use tabs”. I’ve turned it off and on and tried around, but I don’t see any difference in the editor behavior. What’s the difference? What exactly am I missing there?

Btw @ryanjamurphy – great TED Talk! I didn’t expect to find parental advice here.

[ryanjamurphy]

Ha. Thanks. It’s a bit old now but some parts are still relevant!

Use Tabs lets the user decide if they want to use tab characters or a number of spaces to trigger indentation. If Use Tabs is off, it means the user wants to indent things by typing e.g., 4 spaces (and I think pressing tab will just insert four spaces). If it’s on, Obsidian will expect the user to insert tab characters instead.