Pretty Punctuation

An Obsidian plugin that shows smart punctuation without changing your files. Type -- and the file keeps --, but Obsidian shows –.

Plugins like Smart Typography rewrite characters as you type. That changes the file, which breaks plain-text conventions, search, and anything else that reads the markdown. Pretty Punctuation only changes what's displayed.

What it shows

• Live Preview: the line with the cursor or selection shows the raw characters so you can edit them. Source mode shows everything raw.
• Reading view: only the rendered text changes.
• Left alone: code blocks, inline code, frontmatter, links, URLs, HTML, math, comments, tags, horizontal rules, and table separator rows.

Install

No build step. Copy main.js and manifest.json into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/pretty-punctuation/, then enable Pretty Punctuation in Settings → Community plugins.

Limitations

• Quote direction is guessed from the previous character, so a leading apostrophe ('90s) shows as ‘ instead of ’.
• Live Preview works one line at a time, so a quote that spans two lines can curl the wrong way.
• Skipping code and links relies on Obsidian's internal syntax names and some pattern matching, so an unusual case can slip through.