Double underscore display issue

[fl2097]

Screenshots from Sketch 2025.2.1 (205181) running on MacOS 15.6.1 but I’ve been observing this since the initial Athens update

In our forms the “ghost text” for date fields is “__/__/____” so 2 underscores in a row, slash, 2 underscores, slash then 4 underscores. When I enter this text in a symbol field (or in the library object) the display is inconsistent.

After the Athens update I could trick it with a leading space but when I do that now it still doesn’t display the whole string:

This behavior is not present in normal strings, just in symbol text overrides:

[wwwedran (Vedran Židanik)]

I think this could be because underscore is now used to format text within the input field.

[fl2097]

I see that but there’s no documented way to avoid or defeat the markdown formatting and I need one.

e: I’ve even tried locking down text style/decoration in the master symbol and it does nothing.

[Brett]

Hi @fl2097 There is actually a way to escape the text-formatting overrides in cases like this, and that is to use a \ backslash before the formatting character. So in this case, it would need to be used twice, once before the underscore that formats each of your two forward-slashes.

So in order to get __/__/____ to show up, you would need to type _\_/_\_/____ into the override field.

The escaping option was added in a release after the formatting options were introduced, so the online documentation is slightly outdated. I’ll send a note now to the team who handle the docs to get this information added. Thanks.

[fl2097]

I’m happy to see there’s a stopgap but a symbol option in the UI (even if it’s in the overrides section) would be a better solution, IMO. Thanks.