Emphasis

2013-08-22: Behaviour when wrapping with single-* is probably not what is intended. (Same applies when using underscores, _, instead of *)

Emphasis

Bolzano

Markdown

That is what’s intended, and the reason is that the college’s branding makes me use a puny sans-serif font in which italics looks like plain text. Other installations of Bolzano behave like Markdown.

Jason

I see. I’m wondering how close to plain text it looks. To try to get an idea, I saved the page source and edited the html here.](http://10.0.20.115/emph.html)*.) Note the comment at the end. Is that how it looks ? (I’m not sure if all the style sheets and fonts magically flow through).
Here’s a screenshot http://10.0.20.115/images/emph.png

Yes, that’s a good illustration of the problem. I can hardly see the difference between plain and italic there, even when I’m reading it. I agree that it doesn’t need to jump out in peripheral vision … but something you might not be taking into account is that with these bloody academics that use this thing, sometimes it matters exactly which letters are emphasised, and that style is just too subtle to reliably show that.

Depending on how this wiki gets used, maybe I’ll be able to change the font to serif one day.

Jason

——–—

Yes, I see what you mean — it IS kind of subtle. In the screenshot I’m not sure if it’s clear to me that there is emphasis till maybe after the word “as”, but the “as” is meant to be part of what’s emphasized.

Yet (in the current font at least) the bold seems to be overly strong.

And you’re also right that I hadn’t considered that some people might want to emphasize particular letters. Though my immediate reaction to that would be: use the bold if it’s neccessary. (That didn’t seem to work in the word “use” — maybe a bug in the markdown library).

Just out of interest, let’s have a look at the specimen in a different font.

Arial (current) http://10.0.20.115/images/emph.png

Serif http://10.0.20.115/images/emph-serif.png

Bookman http://10.0.20.115/images/emph-bookman.png

Palatino http://10.0.20.115/images/emph-palatino.png

Maybe the <em> is clearer in some of those. And, also, maybe the <strong> isn’t quite so heavy.

RIGHT. The <em> isn’t actually all that great in any of them, is it? But the <strong> is much better than some. Jason

P.S. I rather like ALL CAPS for emphasis anyway, personally.

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