How to get bold or italic characters in your blog entries

A lot of us have had difficulty learning how to get certain words in bold or italics in our blog items.

The system offered to us by The Citizen Online to get that done is primitive and even barbaric. But as Donald Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you’ve got, not the one you wish you had.

In plain English, here’s how it’s done.

At the point where you want words to begin being shown in bold, you put the following items, in succession and without spaces between them: the character for “less than” on top of the comma on your keyboard, the word “strong” without the quotation marks, and the character for “more than” on top of the period on your keyboard.

In previous attempts to show this expression or even parts of it involving the “less than” or “more than” characters in this blog, I found that the Citizen’s computer system would mess it up. Thus my description gets around the problem.

The insertion of this expression in your text will cause the expression itself to disappear but all the words after that will be in bold.

How do you stop the bold characters and go back to what you had? You use the same expression again but insert a slash (/) between the “less than” character and the word “strong.”

That’s primitive and bothersome, but that’s what works.

For italics, you can use the word “cite” instead of “strong” and follow the same technique. I find that the word “em” produces italics too, and I can’t seem to detect a difference between the results either way.

If you use the word “code” and follow the same technique, you should get the same characters you had in your original text. You might try it putting in Greek characters like σίζμά and see what happens. As you can see, I got very good results. You don’t see the “less than” symbol, the word “code,” and the “more than” symbol I put in before these letters, nor do you see the “less than” symbol, the slash, the word “code,” and the “more than” symbol I put in afterwards. It works. But it is a pain.