Bold

Text that is marked up as bold will stand out against the regular, surrounding text due to the application of a thicker and/or darker font. Bold is useful when the text needs to catch the attention of a site visitor quickly scanning a page.

The bold presentation of text maps to the formatted text type known as strong in the AsciiDoc language.

Bold syntax

You can mark a word or phrase as bold by enclosing it in a single pair of asterisks (e.g., *word*) (constrained). You can mark bounded characters (i.e., characters within a word) as bold by enclosing them in a pair of double asterisks (e.g., char**act**ers) (unconstrained).

Example 1. Bold inline formatting
A bold *word*, and a bold *phrase of text*.

Bold c**hara**cter**s** within a word.

You don’t need to use double asterisks when an entire word or phrase marked as bold is directly followed by a common punctuation mark, such as ;, ", and !.

The results of Example 1 are displayed below.

A bold word, and a bold phrase of text.

Bold characters within a word.

Mixing bold with other formatting

You can add multiple emphasis styles to bold text as long as the syntax is placed in the correct order.

Example 2. Order of inline formatting syntax
`*_monospace bold italic phrase_*` & ``**__char__**``acter``**__s__**``

Monospace syntax (`) must be the outermost formatting pair (i.e., outside the bold formatting pair). Italic syntax (_) is always the innermost formatting pair.

The results of Example 2 are displayed below.

monospace bold italic phrase & characters