Bold and italics

[tech]

We are thinking of letting members add bold and italics to messages for emphasis. Being of the old school I don't wholeheartedly approve of such new-fangl ednesses, but hmm... Anyway, I figured we'd use [b]bold section[/b] and [i]italic section[/i] for italics (too much WordPerfect reveal codes in my youth). Anyone have any better ideas?
Of course, they'd display as bold and italic in the message.

Isn't that just like you tech? ALways thinking of others happiness over your own

say what?

say does anyone have a better idea on how to delimit bold and italic sections is what I meant. I'm sure lots of people have lots of better ideas.

Seems ok to me.

I know (Bold or italics needed here) alot of people will be pleased with this

The beloved BBC boards use twinkles either end for bold (as do a lot of us on here to imply bold, you may have noticed?) and slashes either end for italic.

What you just said sounds like esperanto.

see, emma just did it!

It would be easier if we could do control + b for bold and control = i for italics like in word. Sorry wordperfect is a generation before me

That should be control + i for italics!!

Sorry, meant to add a to that, it reads curt!

won't work sadly. * can appear anywhere really. It'll be inappropriate winks all over again. we'd be bolding everyone's swear words. Or do you mean you think we shouldn't do it at all JanH?

and while I'm at it control + u for underlining.

nonono darling, please do do it!

I just didn't understand your example at all [thick]

They get unintended bolding at the beeb too - quite funny sometimes, if someone puts a twinkle in to modify a rude word and another one in later and the whole lot in between turns bold.

Control-keys won't work without a major re-engineering project. If you press Ctrl-I while typing in internet explorer, you get the favourites bar popping up on the left.

just in case what I said was confusing I mean you hold down the 'ctrl' key and then press either 'b', 'i' or 'u' like in word. Is anyone with me?!!

Sorry posts crossed. I thought it would be simple!!

tech dear, could you explain your method again?

[b]bold section[/b]

We would write

b
bold bit
/b

Yes? (It was the square brackets that confused me but they're not part of it?)

On AOL Control-I gets you the instant message box, I just discovered. (I don't like the control key, I'm always hitting it instead of shift and things disappear......)

They are part of it. To start bold you would type [b] and then to end bold [/b]. start italic [i], end italic [/i]. If we didn't have the square brackets it would be very difficult to distinguish an I that says "go italic from here" from an I that just happens to mean I like in "I like chocolate" - if you see what I mean.

Ohhhh - that's a lot of complicated typing for some of us

Mind you we have got used to the [] for emoticons I suppose....

[b] word [/b]

does it matter if there are spaces between the [b] and [/b]?

[b]got it[\b] or have i?

Sounds great tech

I guess as long as the instructions are in the wee box at the bottom we'll get the hang of it

No, JanH, it wouldn't matter. there could be whole sentences if you like. we'd have to also deal with the case where someone starts bold and doesn't end it or the rest of the page might go bold. It would actually be much easier if we limited it to single words. Hmm, there's a thought. maybe we should do
[b]word - does just one word
[b]a phrase[/b] - bold everything between.

It starts to get complicated quite quickly sadly (in the techno sense). I remember when we had the over-zealous profanity filter.... whole messages were turning into asterisks.

yep tech- if someone forgot to put the bold off that would cause serious headaches. We need to HAVE to put it off to stop accidental postings all in bold

When did you have an over-zealous profanity filter? Before my time! !