Semantic line breaks are a feature of Markdown, not a bug writingslowly.com

@writingslowly I’m pretty sure the annoying Markdown line-break convention was a compromise, recognising the lowest common denominator of existing conflicting conventions. It’s always driven me up the wall: clearly a line-break should indicate an actual line-break. Fortunately, some Markdown editors (e.g. Obsidian’s) allow you to express a preference, even if you’re then breaking the official convention.

The other Markdown convention that drives me up the wall is the choice of standards when it comes to indicating bold and underlined text. To me, it’s patently obvious bold text should be marked with single asterisks, and italic text with single underscores: double-asterisks for bold, and single-asterisks for italic look plain ugly. Unfortunately, there’s apparently some leeway for (mis)interpretation in the Markdown standards which means some Markdown editors/interpreters don’t allow you to italicise partial words using underscores. I’ve run foul of this loophole several times, and, as a result, have been forced to adopt the ugly single-asterisk convention for italics.

I’ve developed a number of kludgy scripts for ‘tidying’ Markdown text into my preferred formats. They even tidy straight single- and double-quotes into their curly equivalents, while respecting straight-quotes in YAML metadata and HTML elements. One of these scripts works it way through my entire Obsidian vault tidying up my inconsistencies. (It’s a very dangerous script, so, having got it working, I never make changes to it. I also take daily backups, just in case something goes horribly wrong.)