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Wrote text in an rtl language (from the context of the question you can see it is done with good reason). I then tried to make bold one letter within the word, while making the entire word in italics -> example.
As you can see, it's actually not connected to the orientation of the language.
You can use html tags like <strong> and <em> or <b> and <i> to format in those exceptional cases.
Example:
Bigword
The source for that was:
<i>Big<b>w</b>ord</i>
We don't support intra-word emphasis. This is by design.
See the blog: Three Markdown Gotchas.
In short: if typing some_file_name would render as "somefilename", then that would bother more people than those who really need part of a word to be emphasized.
I've come across this a few times and the solution is relatively simple...
I use a zero width Unicode character between the last asterisk and the next character -
a123
This will also work for BOLD characters...
Here is the zero width character (between the brackets).
()
For ease of use, I made myself a little JavaScript bookmarklet that "displays" an alert with the character inside -
javascript: alert("%E2%80%8B");
As you can see on this page (which is not cached, so it shows you what today's Markdown engine does), this now works. If someone were to edit your question, it would look correctly afterwards. For details, see Markdown change: Intra-word emphasis now works; the short version is that in-word emphasis is now allowed for asterisks, but not underscores (Jeff explained why).
I think that the most you could ask for, is for the Markdown to accept a U200B ( Zero Width Space ) character to seperate the "*" from the rest of the word. Which does actually seem to work.
*exa*\X{200B}**m**\X{200B}ple
example
*exa*​**m**​ple.
You'll have to break out the HTML tags to get a bold letter inside a word. Looks like the WMD preview might be okay on the rough show, but the actual post looks like it's looking for a space on either side of the WMD markup.
I think the bug he's referring to is that trying to produce the following: נזוןשמו
Using this markdown:
*מו**ש**ינזון*
Appears with whole text in italics and the letter ש bold in the preview, but not in the posted version.
You get this instead:
מושינזון
Or maybe that the cursor direction reverses within the string making editing the markdown tricky - the first time I've ever edited Hebrew, that was trippy!
I'm not sure what's supposed to happen, but I couldn't edit HTML into the middle of the text (the tag was dumped to the end).
Edit: It was clarified while I was posting. Sorry for the note-as-a-answer, but considering the bug it's a pain to try and respond with a note!
I'm using Firefox 3.5 on Vista 64 by the way.
As stated above, this works using HTML - but wrapping your head around the RTL movement is a huge pain. I edited it, and I think I managed to do it without messing with the actual text.
