We all use "fancy HTML stuff".

But it's dead easy.

If you type

This is in <I>italics</I> and this is in <B>italics</B>.

you will get

This is in italics and this is in bold.

Easy-peasy!

Just one warning. Please please don't forget to "switch back" to normal text, or you make a complete mess of everything else on the page following you.

Find those little marks . Now what you do is put a i (i for italics or b for bold or u for underline) in between a set of them. That's where I put the word and . Then type your titles. I would show you, but that would put the whole thing in italics and wouldn't show you. Then, to stop the italics you use > with the i after the slash. It won't show up until you do a preview. See? It's easy!

You don't even have to capitalize the I for italics. I use "less than, i, greater than" to start the title, and "less than, forward slash, i, greater than" to end it.

Like this? Winnie-the-Pooh

WAY COOL

THANX

You got it!

But please, let me again emphasise - when you use these tags, ensure that you CLOSE them. Proofread your post throughly, and carefully check the whole preview page. It's not uncommon for someone to "close" using (say) "<b>" instead of "</b>" - and the rest of the page ends up bold.

And yes - you can nest them too, to make something bold and italic, for example. But if you do this, make sure you close them carefully. What I mean is:-

"<b><i>bold and italic</i></b>" will work.
"<b><i>bold and italic</b></i>" will probably NOT work.

In general, avoid underlining. This is not compulsory, it's just good practice.

The reason is that in general, on the Web, an underlined word or phrase is assumed to be a link.

I actually have a saved html cheat sheet that tells me how to do all kinds of stuff but I never use it. I'm such a bad/slow typist that thinking about putting in any of that stuff slows me down so much I don't do it. (I have to make lots of corrections when just straight typing, and as you may have noticed I don't always catch all of the typos.)

This is the first time I've felt I really should use the italics. You don't want to know how long it took me to get this typed!

I see your point. You already knew how to do it - you were hoping that there was an even easier way. Sorry, none that any of us know!

However, every so often, it's always worth having an excuse to repost this for those new members who want to know how to do it!

Speaking for myself, I am perfectly okay with any way you want to denote titles. I just like to have them stand out in some way so that the eye catches them while scanning. I don't think we have very many persnickety types who would complain about simple quotation marks.

I had thought about quote marks but no one uses them. I'm going to try and be good and use italics, most of the time, anyway.

I'm bumping this forward for new people. I'm an old poster (in more ways that one!LOL) but I've been too lazy to make the effort to learn this. Glad I could still find it.

granjan, I still use quote marks. My time on the computer is very limited and I have to post in a hurry most days. I have never thought that I would be kicked off this forum for same.....

Heh Heh...I regard this forum as a "sticky note" genre...italics and underlining? belong in formal written papers...I would never presume that my humble words meet that criteria...plain text will do me fine.
Bob

The New Yorker uses quotation marks for all titles. Why they do I don't know since it's one of the few that still insist on using the diaresis.

You could revive an almost-forgotten tradition and use asterisks.

Some people -- including me -- were using the internet before the days of the web and HTML markup. All we had available to us was plain ascii. This older 7-bit code was limited in what it could express and people became quite creative in using it. Intead of bold or italic, users would enclose text with asterisks.

Here is how it would look.

*Gone with the Wind* by Margarer Mitchell (book title)
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K Leguin (short story title)

It looks funny now, but it does have valid credentials in the early online world. And it is easy and quick.

Rosefolly

Well, currently asterisks are used on message boards to set off a phrase that indicates an action by the poster such as: *goes off to check his OED*. The phrase is usually written in the third person, but the pronoun is dropped.

I used to work for a university press, and in the correspondence and contracts we routinely capitalized all book titles. It saved typists a lot of time because we'd have had to underline the titles then.

Example: Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

All caps makes a lot of sense to me. I have stated being good about using the italics. But it's a PITA when you want to talk about several books at once.

My computer keyboard at work doesn't have the html brackets. Therefore I use quotation marks unless I am composing a message in Word, where I can use the "insert symbol" feature.

granjan - I was scratching my head, wondering what book title PITA was (as it was in caps!), and how it fitted into what you were saying.

Then the penny dropped....

netla - what does your keyboard have for shift-fullstop and shift-comma, then?

Martin, the colon and semi colon. One would think the html brackets were too important to leave off a keyboard, but there are not even Alt-key shortcuts for them.

Bizarre - the semi-colon ALWAYS goes beside the L - that's where it lives. Couldn't be anywhere else - with the single-quote beside that. If it weren't there, my touch-typing would fall to pieces...!

Have you got a numeric keypad? Try holding down ALT and typing 060 on the keypad. If that works, try holding down ALT and typing 062.

I'm too computer challenged to remember how to do that business properly. From now on, when I post a title, I'll put it in caps. (Caps I can handle. I learned caps in typing class in 1960 when I was 15.)

Martin - the Icelandc keyboard is different because there are more letters in our alphabet than the English one (ÃÂ,ÃÂ,ÃÂ,ÃÂ), plus we keep the C and Q which our alphabet doesn't have, so the keyboards are different. It always takes me a while to get up to full typing speed on keyboards designed for other nations.

I always forget the keypad codes so I'll keep using quotation marks (it spoiles the spontaneity to look them up). This way you will be able to tell whether I'm posting from home or from work, because my keyboard at home does have the symbols (inserted, on this occasion, with the help of Word).

I spend my days teaching (and insisting on) correct usage, (books underlined when handwritten, italic when typed, magazine article titles in quotes, etc.) and I have spent many an evening helping my children and their friends construct a Works Cited page to perfect MLA format, as they lose points if they have errors, even something so seemingly insignificant as a single space where a double should be, or a 6 space indent where it should be 5. So I can't make myself not use the italics for the title of a book. Through practice, I've gotten very quick at both "ctrl+i" in Word to italicize what will follow, or the here when HTML is required, and now I don't really think about it anymore. But I agree with Chris-as long as the title is set apart, I don't come to a screaming halt and yell at the screen....but the quotes thing does slow me down, as quotes are used for other titles, not books. If the html is a PITA, I'd personally go for CAPS before " ".

I'm with you, Cece. Old secretarial training plus an English major will come out.

BTW, I saw "He lighted the candles" in the newspaper Sunday. Have I missed the demise of lit?

oh-and next time I need a 4 character password, guess what it will be....

Sorry, wrong place!