Nested Bulleted Lists from Obsidian, Marked Share, and Apex

Question

OMG it's 2026 and I'm having another tabs vs spaces debate.

So, by default nested bulleted lists from Obsidian don't render right in Marked Share. This is probably because by default Obsidian uses tabs instead of spaces for indenting:

- flintstones
- fred
- wilma
- rubbles
- barney
- betty

It's not only Marked Share that doesn't like this - the default processors in Marked don't render this how Obsidian does either. Instead of

flintstones
- fred
- wilma
rubbles
- barney
- betty

They render like this:

flintstones
fred
wilma
rubbles
barney
betty

But who cares when we can enable the awesome Apex processor that renders this as I want! Oh, that's right, I care....because when I publish to Marked Share there doesn't seem to be a way to tell it to use Apex, so it renders it "wrong". Can we pretty please (with sugar on top) have a way to enable Apex rendering on Marked Share?

I'm completely of the opinion that Obsidian is technically broken out of the box on this one. The CommonMark spec says that one indent character (the one tab) totally won't work - you need to use the number of indent characters as there are chars before the start of the list item (so in this case at least two).

So, I "fixed" this for myself by flipping the "Indent using tabs" option off each and every Obsidian vault I use and then writing a Perl script to convert all existing files I've written from tabs to spaces. But I doubt many other people are going to do the former, and almost none of them will do the latter.

And this won't be the last case where Marked Share doesn't render something consistently with what I'm seeing in Marked if they're using different processors. Marked Share should probably allow selecting of processors, and Marked should probably include the processor it's using during upload.

Brett Terpstra · Accepted Answer

This shouldn't be happening at all, 1 tab, 2 spaces, 4 spaces should all work.

Marked Share does run on Apex. Can you attach a file demonstrating the issue for me to test with?

Update: The issue was that Marked is mistakenly stripping tabs as invalid characters when publishing. Marked Share is fine, and the next update to Marked will fix this.

Mark Fowler · Answer

Thanks so much for responding so quickly and addressing everything perfectly.

In case you're curious, I went back to work out why the default renderers in Marked weren't "working" for me - it's because my document was actualy like Example 303 from the CommonMark spec where there's part of a paragraph right above the list.

The Bobs
- bob
- bill
- riker (aka will)
- charles
- howard

CommonMark says that should render as a paragraph and list (and the CommonMark renderer in Marked does do that) but all the ones I'd tried (MultiMarkdown, Discount, and Kramdown) all refused to render that as anything other that a paragraph with breaks in it (and ate the whitespace at the start of lines, rendering it literally like:

The Bobs
- bob
- bill
- riker (aka will)
- charles
- howard

Nested Bulleted Lists from Obsidian, Marked Share, and Apex

2 Answers