Let's talk about Asterisks!

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Could be that asterisk performs a function in Markdown.

*this has an asterisk at the beginning of the line

this has an asterisk at the beginning and end of the line

this has an asterisk around the last word

*this has an asterisk at the beginning of the line

*this has an asterisk at the beginning and end of the line*

this has an asterisk around the last *word*
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The comment system here uses the Markdown formatting language. If you want normal asterisks (as opposed to asterisks that perform Markdown’s <em> and <strong> functions), you can always escape them (by typing\*). I’m not sure why Markdown has become so popular in vanilla comment sections and blogs, tbh… it’s not the most intuitive way to format things (although it is faster than writing HTML or putzing with a toolbar). Hardly anyone is going to figure out the difference between *emphasis* and **strong** without reading the Markdown spec.

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By itself, the asterisk appear to be a bullet point:

  • this has an asterisk (and looks like a bullet, with the line indented)

* this has the characters ampersand ast; (and looks like a semicolon IN PREVIEW, but shows up as the raw characters after posting. although sometimes it appears as a semicolon. after I appended the photo it was an asterisk. after F5 refresh it’s back to raw. different markup rules apply at different times?)

* this has ampersand #42; (and looks like a semicolon in preview)

asterisk.png652×549 32.4 KB

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* is a slash-asterisk. In preview… and post… and F5 refresh.

WINNER

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Yeah, I always thought it would be a bit more intuitive if _underlines_ produced italics and *asterisks* produced bold. But if it helps you could do **bold** versus _italic_.

And there is the toolbar which has bold and italic buttons of course, if you forget.

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