I was trying to quote a passage that put an i in . When I previewed, I saw that everything after it was italicized.
How do you use such that whatever is in the brackets appears as text rather than altering things as a code?
[ Try inserting a space after the first bracket and before the closing bracket. Like this. ]
AudreyK, that occurred to me a little too late to be useful. I’m wondering if there aren’t other ways as well. 
There must be another way; I’ve seen posts where somebody was explaining how to use the vB tags; one line would show what you had to type, the next would show the result; they didn’t insert spaces or substitute curly braces either.
[**i]
Click on quote to see how I did it.
[**i]
[u]
[[sup][/sup]sup]
success!
Thanks, bibliophage
test
Nice one [b]bibliophage[/b] 
thanks
It took me a while to get my brain around that one. Neat.
For people who are too lazy to pick quote, he did it like this:
[[i][/i]i]
BUT IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
[[i][/i]i] ]
Freaky stuff. Using “Click Quote” is easier, though.
This stuff, and also the [sub]small font[/sub] questions appear so often it’s too bad it’s not somewhere more permanent. I wonder if we can add info to the “vB code” page? Or at least ask them to update it? It probably is a common question on all their customers’ boards.
Here’s a thread about creating a new FAQ.
I think the thread is, for all intents and purposes, dead, but it shows that we have had some discussion about creating such a document here before.
It just didn’t get nowhere… 
He obviously typed [[[i][/i]i][[i][/i]/i]i]
Well, it just so happens that that is what I typed, but only because I was feeling unimaginitive. Realize that I could just as easily have typed [[i[b][/b]][[/i]i] or [[i[sub][/sub]][[/[sup][/sup]i]i] or even [[[u][/u]i][[sUP][/Sup]/i[sub][/SuB]]i].
OK, Achernar, you win. You obviously have more time on your hands than I. Fall break?
Of course, for bonus points, you should also have done sym.
Well, I would have, but the [Sym] tag comes with an undesirable whitespace. Specifically, it gets replaced with '<FONT face=“symbol”> '. It would have wound up looking something like this:
[[Sym][/Sym]i]
Looking at my post, though, I see that there is an undesirable whitespace. I didn’t put that. I guess it just comes from having unbroken text three-or-so lines long.