Text Formatting¶

Like vanilla Markdown, you can apply basic text formatting using a variety of delimiters. Every inline node has a role as its canonical spelling, and most have a familiar shorthand as sugar; both produce the same node.

*(regular)* The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

*(italic)* *The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.*

*(bold)* **The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.**

*(bold italic)* ***The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.***

*(strikethrough)* ~~The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.~~

*(small capitals)* {sc}[The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.]

*(highlight)* {mark}[The quick brown fox] and *(keys)* {keys}[ctrl+s].

__x__ is small caps, not a second bold: that is deviation X1 of the degradation classes, disabled by the strict profile. __ duplicates **, and academic writing needs small caps far more than a second bold — and the difference is visible, not silent.

Delimiters stack for bold italic, and _ never opens emphasis inside a word, so snake_case_name stays literal.

Underline and ^^x^^¶

Underline has a role and no default sugar: print typography treats the underline as a typewriter relic, and the obvious spelling __x__ went to small caps instead.

^^x^^ — PyMdownX's caret "insert" — is not a TMark construct. With the feature inline.insert off, which is the default, it is literal text and raises the hint feature-off. Switched on, it is sugar for {underline}[x]: one node whatever the spelling, and the printer emits the role.

---
press:
  features:
    inline.insert: true
---

Now {underline}[inserted] text, or ^^inserted^^ in sugar.

Substitutions¶

Three things are rewritten while a run of text is scanned, all of them producing ordinary text rather than a node:

• (c), -->, 1/2 and their siblings, and a "straight-quoted" phrase, which is why quotes reach the PDF as \enquote{…} in the document's language — see Smart symbols and quotes;
• :smile:, which expands to the character, while a Material icon shortcode becomes a web-only span that print drops — see Emoji and icons.

LaTeX, XeLaTeX, BibTeX and their siblings, written as plain words, are set as logos by the writers: there is no node and no role, the words stay ordinary text, and the rule is the feature typography.tex-logos (on, whole words only, never inside code, math, raw passthroughs, link destinations or attribute values).

Lead-in paragraphs ({lead}[…])¶

A lead-in — a short run-in heading that opens a paragraph — has an explicit role:

{lead}[Boot sequence.] The device powers the flash before the SoC…

A paragraph whose whole content is a strong span shorter than 80 characters is promoted to a lead-in automatically while the paragraph.lead feature is on (the default; off under strict). A strong span that merely opens a paragraph is a bold run-in and stays one — promoting it would move the rest of the sentence into a paragraph of its own, since \tslead breaks the paragraph around the lead-in — and a bold-only list item is a label, not a lead-in. The promotion is sugar, not magic: it is named, switchable, and tmark lint --fix rewrites it to the role. Either way TeXSmith emits \tslead{…}, defined as:

\providecommand{\tslead}[1]{\par\noindent\textbf{#1}\par\nobreak\smallskip}

This guarantees a no-indent paragraph break and a small vertical breather, so the label looks identical regardless of what precedes it. Without this, **Méthodologie** wedged between two tables (\end{center} ... \textbf{…} ... \begin{center}) would render flush left while the same construct after running prose would be indented by babel-french's \parindent. With \tslead, both cases align.

La synthèse récapitule, pilier par pilier, les forces et faiblesses…

{lead}[Sens critique]

| Python | C |
|--------|---|
| Faible | Fort |

{lead}[Méthodologie]

| Python | C |
|--------|---|
| Correcte | Forte |

Written as **Sens critique** on a line of its own, the same two labels are promoted to lead-ins automatically and tmark lint says so (lead-promotion). The rule fires only when the paragraph is that strong span and nothing else, and its plain text is shorter than 80 characters. Bold spans inside running prose (Some **bold** text.), a run-in such as **Leading bold:** followed by text, and bold paragraphs over the threshold all keep their \textbf{…} rendering. The {lead}[…] role, by contrast, always takes what follows it on the paragraph, whatever the feature says.

Override \tslead in a custom preamble snippet to change the visual style — for instance, to add a coloured rule, switch to small caps, or replace the \smallskip with \medskip:

\renewcommand{\tslead}[1]{\par\noindent\textsc{#1}\par\nobreak\medskip}

.texsmith-smallcaps {
    font-variant: small-caps;
    letter-spacing: 0.04em;
}

extra_css:
  - stylesheets/smallcaps.css