Part of a word bold in reStructuredText

Question

How can I make a part of a word bold in reStructuredText?

Here is an example of what I need: ".rst stands for restructured text."

Horripilate

Answer 1

I was surprised that you could not simply write

.rst stands for **r**e**s**tructured **t**ext.

but the reStructuredText specification indeed states that inline markup must be followed by white-space or one of - . , : ; ! ? \ / ' " ) ] } or >, so the above string of reStructuredText is not valid. However, only a minor change is required to get valid character markup with backslash escapes. Changing the above to

.rst stands for **r**\ e\ **s**\ tructured **t**\ ext.

works fine. To see this in action try the online reST to HTML converter.

Ickes

Just to add that in some cases you can get away without space after the backslash. In this case, **r**\e\ **s**\ tructured **t**\ext. (I'm not impressed by this aspect of reST, by the way.) – Mala

Answer 2

An alternative solution is to use the setting character-level-inline-markup. Then, the example markup .rst stands for **r**e**s**tructured **t**ext. works as expected.

Jeffreys