Why Don't Italics Always Work?

[bainbrig]

square bracket i square bracket

Used to italicise things, nowadays doesn't (well, sometimes does - vetuste's seem to work.

What occurs, Ed?

BB

[dannyk13]

Maybe you making typos. works for me

[goodgoalie]

I've only tried it occasionally

[jim360]

It's when you have too many[i goes at italics that it [i]always] goes wrong...

[jim360]

Or if there's a lot. of punctuation marks involved!

[vetuste_ennemi]

Doesn't work with diacritics and some punctuation marks, Bainbrig.

Médecins sans Frontières.

Trying without the accents:

Medecins sans Frontieres[i.

Trying [i]with] the accents:

[i]Médecins sans Frontières[i].

[vetuste_ennemi]

Trying with the accents:

[i]Médecins sans Frontières[i].

[jim360]

Maybe it's a specific type of [i] ... "punctuation mark"?[i]

[IJKLM]

Testing...

Roman

Italic[i

Roman

[i]Italic[i]

I hear that one can only get the [i]italic[i] style once per post, or maybe it was [i]once per sentence]. I can't really remember...

[vetuste_ennemi]

OH. Well, well. Make a liar of me, then.

First post omitted a bracket invalidation the experiment.

[i]Médecins sans Frontières[i].

(Will it or won't it?)

[jim360]

Basically, the italics coding is broken, and for whatever reason the Editing team has been unable to fix it, or, alternatively, hasn't got around to it yet.

One way to go would be to make the AB message boxes fully compatible with BBCode. I am not sure how difficult this would be to set up, it might require a large-scale overhaul. Alternatively, they could implement TeX coding (which would also be useful in the Science and, occasionally, homework help sections).

[bainbrig]

Fair enough, it’s broke.

As long as can temporarily use CAPS for emphasis and not get drummed off.

BillB

[dannyk13]

If it is broken how can I be using italics now

[jim360]

I've resorted to *asterisks* as a substitute -- I think it's a slightly better alternative than CAPS, which is more like shouting rather than emphasis.