Potential workaround for lack of support for empty paragraphs?

[lukasb]

Hello - I'm writing an app that needs to interoperate with Obsidian's "Markdown" format, which means that this:

abc

def
ghi

needs to turn into this

<p>abc</p>
<p></p>
<p>def</p>
<p>ghi</p>

I've seen the discussion at https://github.com/orgs/syntax-tree/discussions/33 about why Markdown does not support this, unfortunately I am compelled to offer support for what Obsidian does. If anyone cares to help me on my way to perdition, I was wondering whether the following approach would work:

1. When parsing Markdown, replace '\n\n' with '\n:::blank\n' or some other custom directive that I can turn into a blank paragraph in my app
2. When producing Markdown, emit :::blank for empty paragraphs, and then replace :::blank with \n in the produced Markdown

[JounQin]

https://github.com/johackim/remark-obsidian

https://www.google.com/search?q=remark+obsidian&oq=remark+obsidian&gs_lcrp=EgRlZGdlKgYIABBFGDkyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg7MgYIAhAAGB4yCggDEAAYgAQYogQyCggEEAAYgAQYogQyCggFEAAYgAQYogQyCggGEAAYgAQYogQyCggHEAAYgAQYogQyBggIEEUYPNIBCDI4NDlqMGo0qAIAsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Just search remark + obsidian, no guarantee it will work as you expected.

[lukasb]

Hmm, the Obsidian plugins I have seen don't mention this. Obsidian doesn't even mention support for blank paragraphs on their own page about "Obsidian-Flavored Markdown" - but their app does round-trip blank paragraphs successfully.

I probably should have posted this to the Remark repo, sorry about that.

[JounQin]

If it doesn't, you'll need to write your own plugin anyway. remark itself will never support this kind of non-spec-compliant features.