Bold, italics and underlining

Simple text formatting helps to highlight important concepts within a document and make it more readable. Using italics, bold or underlined words can change the perception of the reader.

[edit] Introduction

In this article three basic text formatting tools will be explained: italics, bold and underline. Let's begin with an example:

As you can see, there are three basic commands and they can be nested to get combined effects.

Note: The commands \it and \bf also work to italicize and boldface text, but it's not recommended to use them since they don't preserve previous styles. With these you can't, for instance, italicize and make a text bold at the same time.

[edit] Italicized text

To make a text italic is straightforward, use the \textit command:

[edit] Bold text

To make a text bold use \textbf command:

[edit] Underlined text

Underlining text is very simple too, use the \underline command:

[edit] Emphasising text

Text can be emphasized by using \emph command. Sometimes the \emph command behaves just as \textit, but is not exactly the same:

What the \emph command actually does with its argument depends on the context - inside normal text the emphasized text is italicized, but this behaviour is reversed if used inside an italicized text- see example above: