Hi All, So I just joined the list - first off, Markdown is a great format and we're using it in our online community project disCourse: http://discourse.ics.hawaii.edu We're using markdown for our wiki pages, stories, message postings, pretty much everywhere. One markdown policy that doesn't seem to fit intuitively for our users is the fact that embedded underscores leads to italics. My apologies if this is an already much discussed aspect of Markdown, but while the syntax for showing embedded underscores (escaping them) is clear, I can't think of many situations where one would want embedded italics. In our user community at least the much more common use of embedded underscores is in database table names and file names, e.g. my_fave_file.txt user_workspaces_tbl Whatever the official markdown policy I think we will override it locally for our disCourse system, but I was interested to know what other markdown users thought. Many thanks in advance CHEERS> SAM
On 6/30/06, Sam Joseph <srjoseph@hawaii.edu> wrote: [snip]> > In our user community at least the much more common use of embedded > underscores is in database table names and file names, e.g. > > my_fave_file.txt > user_workspaces_tbl >[snip] 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 -- ---- Waylan Limberg waylan@gmail.com
Hi Sam, * Sam Joseph <srjoseph@hawaii.edu> [2006-06-30 19:50]:> One markdown policy that doesn't seem to fit intuitively for > our users is the fact that embedded underscores leads to > italics.this has been complained about multiple times; I started one of these threads too, when John himself ran afoul of it in a Daring Fireball article. At the time, he agreed this was a problem and said he would adjust the matching for embedded underscores in an upcoming version. The only reason that this hasn?t changed, I think, is that unfortunately no new releases have happened in a long time. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>