I certainly use bold and italic for different things. Bold is used for drawing attention to something that I worry the reader might otherwise miss completely (e.g. "NOTE: don't try this at home"), whereas italic is used to substitute for tone of voice, indicating which of the words in a sentence you were reading anyway is the most important or unexpected or key.
In environments where I have bold and/or italics available, I only use stars for emote-style actions (*hug*), never for emphasis. Even then, I'm at least as likely to write emotes using angle brackets (<hug>).
In ASCII, actually, I almost never use stars for emphasis (though I'll use them for emotes as above), and when I do I use them for really strong emphasis along the same lines as bold ("*NOTE*: don't actually do this"). For italic-level emphasis in ASCII I use underscores ("the _real_ problem is..."). The only exception to that is in subject lines on Monochrome, because Mono uses terminal escape sequences to underline the whole of a subject line and hence my surrounding underscores become invisible in most fonts, so I use stars for emphasis under protest.
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Date: 2008-02-22 11:38 am (UTC)In environments where I have bold and/or italics available, I only use stars for emote-style actions (*hug*), never for emphasis. Even then, I'm at least as likely to write emotes using angle brackets (<hug>).
In ASCII, actually, I almost never use stars for emphasis (though I'll use them for emotes as above), and when I do I use them for really strong emphasis along the same lines as bold ("*NOTE*: don't actually do this"). For italic-level emphasis in ASCII I use underscores ("the _real_ problem is..."). The only exception to that is in subject lines on Monochrome, because Mono uses terminal escape sequences to underline the whole of a subject line and hence my surrounding underscores become invisible in most fonts, so I use stars for emphasis under protest.