this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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If you know Javascript you could very easily write a plugin in Obsidian to do this. Just have the plugin replace any markdown with the Unicode equivalent on save.
Great question though, it's actually making me wonder why this isn't a thing in normal plain text editors!
Because it's not actually a good idea.
You create text that is basically impossible to search. Like, for instance, do a Ctrl+F on this page and search for "Bold". You'll see the example from OP doesn't get picked up, because it's not a B, it's a 𝗕. And it's not an o, it's an 𝗼. And so on. Or how about this? Go on Google and copy-paste this word from OP: "s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵". Now, stroke isn't a particularly unusual word, but this thread is just about the only result Google returns. Because it's not stroke. It's s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵.
It's also bad for accessibility. A lot of the time screen readers just won't know what to do with your bold or italic Unicode text.
And of course this only works for characters for which Unicode actually has these variants. Not a problem with the Latin alphabet, but what about Arabic? Cyrillic? Chinese? Devanagari? Hangul? Not gonna work.
These characters are from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols code block. They're stylized Greek and Latin letters meant chiefly for use in mathematical contexts. The Unicode standard explicitly advises against using them to fake markup for the reasons outlined above and more. A simple markup language is just about always going to be preferable to faking it with Unicode.
This here is the best answer, i'd like to add:
Just use Markdown or Org-mode and then export to HTML. Most devices should have a browser capable of display this.
Right? Why make the text editor Unicode capable but not implement this? Are we too stuck in the xml ways?