Allow markdown within a word

[HeyMyian]

I find it useful to allow markdown within a word, specifically italics, to emphasize a certain part.

_penni_less --> penniless
**penni**less --> penniless
~~penni~~less --> penniless
Neither work, they output (build tool) the markdown symbols instead applying the formatting. The syntax highlighter also does not recognize it.

Not sure if bug or feature request. I thought not recognizing it was standard markdown behavior, but Discord and GitHub for example know how to deal with it.

[vkbo]

This is defined behaviour: https://novelwriter.io/docs/usage_format.html#text-emphasis

The Markdown standard allows for it, but not all implementations support it. novelWriter does not, and changing it would have a lot of implications.

The main issue now is that syntax highlighting uses regex to process the formatting. Standard Markdown cannot in general be process with single regex filters though, so that puts a limit on this. I have considered writing a custom parser that uses programmed logic to determine formatting, and I already do this for headers, meta data and comments, but not for body text. Mostly because iterating through text character by character is fairly slow in Python.

I may have to revisit this anyway due to other requested features, so I can take this request into consideration as well in the process.

[vkbo]

Have a look in issue #1337.

I am working on a suitable syntax for sub/superscript, and I think the syntax can be extended to support special cases of complex formatting like you request here. I'm proposing to use {xx:text} notation for inserting custom things in the text, where xx is a code, and text the text to apply it to. In a branch I've added codes for bold and italics as well, and since this is presumably not something you need very often, it's not a too clunky syntax. The highlighter helps make it stand out too.

Join the thread and let me know what you think. I don't want to split the discussion into two places. This notation can also be used for footnotes, and perhaps other features too since it is very flexible and incredibly easy to parse.