underscore and italic policy

[Sam Joseph]

Hi Waylan,

Thanks for your input.  Good point.  Making them inline code is a good 
suggestion.  At the moment we're using ruby BlueCloth implementation of 
Markdown which has a problem with backtick support (single backticks 
cause an error, so I'm filtering them out at present), but that is 
besides the point.

You are right that a faq entry should alert users to this issue, but for 
many users I think we can rely on them not reading the faq.

Personally I would like to avoid having to type the backticks in because 
I can't think of any situation where I would actually want embedded 
italics, but then I can also see that if embedded bold works, it makes 
sense to have consistent functionality for italics.

Hmm.  The other issue for me is that we include auto_linking in our 
system, on top of markdown, and thus underscores in urls get italicized 
and break the auto_linked urls, but again that's an issue peculiar to 
us, although I'm not sure why markdown doesn't just autolink urls, since 
I can't think of many situations where I wouldn't want a url auto_linked 
- I guess if it was a dummy link or something.  And what if I want the 
link text to be the link title. Right now I have to do:

[http://mysite.com/place_me_here.html](http://mysite.com/place_me_here.html)

which is a bit of a pain.

Just thinking out loud ...

CHEERS> SAM


Waylan Limberg wrote:


> I don't have anything to add to the italics policy, but when using

> file names and table names within a body of text, wouldn't they be

> considered inline code[1]? In my experience that is usually how

> documentation is formatted. That being the case, one would do:

>

>    `my_fave_file.txt`

>    `user_workspaces_tbl`

>

> which, IMHO makes the italics policy irrelevant in this case. True,

> you may have users who fail to use the backticks to start with, but

> the problem is easy to spot and a simple addition to your FAQ page

> should cover those issues.

>

> [1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#code

>

>