Stricter Syntax

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Stricter Syntax#

The current specification means that anything after e.g. a ** is bold. This will often lead to problems when these characters are used on their own. (e.g. ** is often put in text to mean (refer to the point elsewhere). The potential problem is the same for other inline markup.

Proposal#

The proposal is to ignore any symetrical inline double markup which does not immediately proceed a non whitespace character. (** // __ ) but not ( [[ {{ )

That is:

 ** refer to my letter previously 

would print as is, but

 **refer to my letter

would come out as bold.

Comment#

An even tighter requirement would logically be to insist the starting sequence would be

<whitespace><double-symbol><Non-white-space>

and final sequence the reverse. But whilst, this is probably logical, this is not part of the proposal, because the chance of mistakenly starting a block of bold text should be low and so an isolated '**' should be ignored, but it should be easy to stop a bold sequence, so an isolated ** when in a bold sequence should not be ignored.