Markdown formatted view shows a blank preview with Underscores in code blocks

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  nampara17 · Member · May 30, 2026 at 12:16 pm

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  I have noticed that if you add an underscore in your code block it will cause the markdown preview to show a blank screen. For example:

    TEMPLATE_PROJECT.capcut

  This is within a code block and therefore you should be able to use single underscores without affecting the markdown view, but in my tests by adding an underscore (even though within a code block) it causes the markdown preview to show a blank screen.

  If you change the underscore to (for example) a hyphen the markdown preview shows correctly? E.g.

    TEMPLATE-PROJECT.capcut

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  nampara17 · Member · May 30, 2026 at 12:35 pm

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  Also if you have markdown that would be interpreted incorrectly it will totally blank out the whole thing. For example if you want to display a number of stars in a table with:

  *****

  To represent 5 stars it will cause your entire preview in markdown to fail

  In this case it is essential to replace the invalid characters with the escape character before each:

  *****

  And that will now render the markdown and not show a blank screen.

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  nampara17 · Member · May 30, 2026 at 12:38 pm

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  That previous comment rendered incorrecly the second set of ‘stars’ should of been shown like this:

  *****
  

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  nampara17 · Member · May 30, 2026 at 12:40 pm

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  ARhhhh cannot get it to display backslash followed by a star five times as it renders it just as stars in this editor!

  *****

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  tamiratb · Staff · June 19, 2026 at 6:58 pm

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  Hi @nampara17!

  Thanks for the detailed report and examples.

  Could you let us know which platform and version of Simplenote you’re experiencing this on? There was a known issue with blank markdown previews that has been fixed in the latest service release, which you can try out in one of these ways:

  • Web app: app.simplenote.com
  • Desktop (Windows/Mac/Linux etc…): Download the latest version from our releases page

  Please give that a try and let us know if the issue still happens.

  Looking forward to hearing back!

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  nampara17 · Member · June 20, 2026 at 9:42 am

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  “There was a known issue with blank markdown previews that has been fixed in the latest service release“

  I generally use the online version but it says: 2.25.0 beta1 ? Surely the online version would upgrade automatically when next online?