We use an in house IM system at work and quite by accident I discovered that placing an asterisk around text bolds it. Also, placing a forward slash around text makes it italic.
I’d like to know all of the tags available but this is a large corporation and just finding the right person to ask would be a chore.
Is this some standard I’m not aware of or did the guys at work just make these tags up?
This was (still is) the convention when using plain-text email and Usenet messages, since you couldn’t mark up your message. There’s bold, /italic/, and underline. That’s about it.
Thanks!
If your system is in-house then those guys just made it up, based on what Terminus Est described. There is no standard for it, just a /de facto/ practice. So the only guys who can tell you are the geeks at work who wrote the system.
FWIW, modern versions of Microsoft Word to this, too, but only for bold and italic. You can turn it on an off in the autocorrect options.
I use this feature a lot because I tend to type on an Alphasmart - a simple electronic text editor that doesn’t support formatting. When I plug it in to the computer, it acts like a keyboard and types its information into whatever app happens to be open. So the above trick lets me get bold and italic into Word from a device that doesn’t have them.
What, apparently, it will not do is fix my lousy typing:
“to” = “do”, “on an off” = “on and off”, relocate the commas to where they make sense.
It’s Setext, unless they’re just borrowing some of the better-known conventions thereof.