Re: Markdown italics and quotation marks

[Daniel Staal <DStaal-Jdbf3xiKgS8@public.gmane.org>]

On 4/4/23 7:22 PM, Some Author Guy wrote:
> I'm writing a book with ships in it. It's not uncommon for a quote to 
> begin with the name of a ship, which I will attempt to italicize, but 
> then to continue with normal speech, which ought not to be italicized. 
> Consider the following paragraph:
> 
> *"Shipname* is in port for the next week."
> 
> This always fails. I get a pair of asterisks in the output and no 
> italics. I don't have this problem without the unbalanced quotation 
> mark, but I don't know why that is. I can't imagine why the quote would 
> have any significance.

This one it's actually easier to see the issue in HTML.  Here's what 
you're writing:

<em><quote>Shipname</em> is in port for the next week.</quote>

You can see in that the tags are improperly nested.  Now, I can see an 
argument that Markdown shouldn't need to follow nesting conventions like 
HTML does, but the point stands that you have two overlapping tag 
sequences.  (And in this case at least, I think it's also good English 
grammar - you're trying to italicize the name of the ship, not the start 
of the quote.)

As John has already said, correcting the nesting will solve the issue:

<quote><em>Shipname</em> is in port for the next week.</quote>

Or in Markdown:

"*Shipname* is in port for the next week."

Daniel T. Staal

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
This email copyright the author.  Unless otherwise noted, you
are expressly allowed to retransmit, quote, or otherwise use
the contents for non-commercial purposes.  This copyright will
expire 5 years after the author's death, or in 30 years,
whichever is longer, unless such a period is in excess of
local copyright law.
---------------------------------------------------------------