Bold italic in ReStructuredText

v_2e picture v_2e · Aug 16, 2012 · Viewed 12.8k times · Source

I'm writing some documentation using ReStructuredText (ReST) format for the later web-page generation using Sphinx, and I cannot find a way to write some "bold italic" text.

There are markers for the so-called 'emphasis' (italic) and 'strong emphasis' (bold) text. They are *italic text* and **bold text** respectively. I also read in some documentation on this format that these formatting markers cannot be simply "nested". I.e. the ***text*** (or ** *text* **) does not produce the bold italic text.

Still there probably should be some way to produce a text emphasized both with bold and italic markers, since it is a widespread practice to mark pieces of text that way.

Answer

user647772 picture user647772 · Aug 16, 2012

Although Markdown supports nesting bold and italic, reStructuredText does not (this is one of the rare cases where Markdown is more powerful, as there is no way to represent bold italics in reStructuredText).

https://gist.github.com/1855764