Remove conflicting existing markdown formatting classes, overriding them

[chuangcaleb]

The Problem

There are Conflicts between Obsidian-flavored Markdown vs Fountain.

For the > Centred Text < and > Forced Transition Fountain token, Obsidian's standard blockquote token is still detected (since it is a > character that starts a line) and so there are unwanted/conflicting HTML classes being applied (these being cm-formatting-quote cm-formatting-quote-1 cm-quote cm-quote-1 as seen in the screenshot below).

Then Fountain's _Underlined Text_ and /* Boneyard */ tokens conflict with Obsidian's native _Italicised Text_ and * Leading-Asterisk Italicised Text formatting tokens.

The Solution

There are at least two ways to solve this:

Overload(?) Obsidian's native markdown formatting

This is the strategy used for this plugin so far: Obsidian-Fountain-Editor is a superset of Obsidian-flavoured Markdown, so we just add styles on top of existing markdown styles. This is good, because we don't need to reinvent inline boldface, section headings, etc. so it makes sense to continue with this

But when it comes to conflicts where we want Obsidian's regular Markdown to be suppressed (like asterisk italicising), we will have to undo those applied HTML classes.

This may be a lot of funky coding with CodeMirror (which is really complex) and may leave a problematically-HTML-structured CodeMirror document (think weird excessive nested span elements)

Disable Obsidian's native markdown formatting

The other option is to modify the standard markdown processor to prevent triggering certain markdown styles like underscore-italicising, so that our plugin can swoop in and cleanly format underscore-wrapped-text as underlined text.

This is definitely trickier as I don't know of a way to disable core behaviour, much less disable it only for particular documents (remember, other notes should get Obsidian's native markdown formatting as normal). And they probably use some lesser-known efficient low-level parser (like Lezer) (I'm using simple regex!) that may also be locked behind closed-source.

But this definitely is the superior long-term strategy, since (1) it makes for a cleaner HTML DOM, which means cleaner CSS targeting (2) finer-tuned CodeMirror control; especially if there's an API to easily + directly style certain tokens, then that also instantly fixes #11.

Task

• - blockquote
• - underline
• - boneyard

[wesleyboar]

I am trying to grok the problem, so I could contribute.

My original understanding, before the update on 2024-01-29…

What I See

• ✅ Any "> Centered text <"… and "> Forced transition" seem fine…
• ❌ Any _Underlined text_ is italicized instead of underlined.
• ❌ Any /* Boneyard */'s:
  • are not styled
  • hide final asterisk
  • italicize final slash

Screenshot

Source Code

---
cssclasses:
  - fountain
---
> Centered text <

> Forced transition

_Underlined text_

/* Boneyard (single line) */

/*
INT. BONEYARD

SOMEONE
Help me.
*/

EXT. BONEYARD

SOMEONE ELSE
You don't look so well.

Questions

1. What is the "blockquote" problem?
2. Do I understand the other problems?

[chuangcaleb]

Thank you for grokkin with me! — let me update the ticket description. I didn't think I'll be working on this particular one for a while, so I hadn't touched it, please get in touch if you want more explanation! Thanks again!