In a Lounge thread I just tried to italicize a paragraph but, when I submitted the post, the paragraph was both italicized and bolded.

Thinking it might be related to the paste (which was in plain text), I typed in the entire paragraph. However, an attempt to italicize generated the same result.

If it assists, it's the quote beginning "Despite the large amount....." in the Too Many Pills thread.

I just italicized* that quote without apparent problem, by just adding the requisite tags. Unfortunately, this doesn't explain your observations of the automagical and simultaneous bolding of that quote when you attempted this.

*) To me it looks italicized in both preview and submission, NOT bold.

Except that your result was now what I was trying to avoid, and which I did not instruct the system to provide...it was Bolded.

I only wanted italicization. The problem is that, although I selected ONLY italics, the result was italics AND bolding.

I have now put it back to plain text as it is the only way to get rid of the Bolding. REverting to plain text was done by deleting the instructions between these brackets [ ]. I note that the brackets only had [i][/i], without any [b][/b], and yet the text was bold.

It seems likely to me that the undesired bolding is something that's happening on your end. This thread is a better place to explore that surmise than the Lounge thread, though. A couple of experiments come to mind.

First, I'll post some text which is italicized but not bolded:

This text is italicized but not bolded.

Does it appear bolded to you?

Second, you should post a snippet of the text that appears bolded to you when you've only applied italic tags, and wait to see how it looks to other readers.

Expanding on second, is the anomalous bolding present after you hit both "Preview Post" and "Submit?"

I've seen instances of oddities appearing in previews not surviving submission.

Yes.


I'm assuming you mean I should create something in this thread, as I did in the other, and see what the results are. Will do.

I did not see the bolding when I created the text, and I don't believe I saw the italicizing either, when I hit "Submit".

I don't recall the status of either in Preview as I didn't preview the post.

So, here's a test.

"I'm going to add only italicizing to this text."

...and then I will submit it, after which I will edit this post to report.

Report: After submitting I looked at the text here in the thread and it appears both bold and italicized. When I returned to do this edit, I viewed it in Preview (forgot earlier) and it is the same...bold and italics...in Preview.

As I suspected, something on your system accounts for what you're seeing. Here's what your post looks like in Safari on my machine.

Can you look at the thread in another browser?

Like dkmarsh, I see just italicized text, not bolded. Have you tried using Font Book to resolve duplicates and/or validate fonts?

I've viewed in Firefox 3.6.4 and the text is displayed the same as it is in Safari.

I did both recently. After resolving duplicates I deleted everything that was a duplicate.

When I validated, I got warnings. MT Plain had two minor warnings and, as I recall, a "use with caution". Bauhaus had a red flag with a much more ominous warning. I deleted both fonts.

I have now conducted both a Permissions Repair and a DiskWarrior directory rebuild, using the scavenge rebuild option.

I am still seeing both tests as before - italics and bold.

My suspicion is that the italic version of whichever font your browsers are using to display FTM content is disabled, damaged, or missing, and your browsers are substituting the bold italic version instead.

Try this: Open Font Book, choose All Fonts in the Collection column, and scroll to Trebuchet MS in the Font column. Assuming you have Trebuchet MS, which is the preferred FTM font according to my reading of the FTM stylesheet, click the disclosure triangle to expand the Trebuchet MS font family. Is Italic dimmed? If so, right-click or Control-click it and choose Enable "Trebuchet MS Italic" from the pop-up menu.

If this doesn't work, or if you encounter a different scenario from what I've outlined, post back and we'll have at it again.

We have lift-off. I couldn't find "Trebuchet MS Italic" in Font Book, so I restored from my Time Machine. All is now well except it's raised a font question which I'll post in the appropriate forum.

Thanks dk, and thanks Jon.