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3.3 Paragraphs and text emphasis

A new paragraph is started by an empty line (or a paragraph ends in an empty line if you like). There is no special marker for this. A mere newline does not start a new paragraph: you need two newlines in sequence. This allows paragraph body text to be wrapped with simple newlines. ((The Unix or emacs tradition is to explicitly wrap
 the paragraphs by inserting single newlines to keep lines about 70
 characters long. However, pd2tex does not require this: you can keep
 entire paragraph as one line, like Mac or Word users would, as long as
 there are two newlines between paragraphs.)) Note that the formatter will not respect the simple line breaks, it will still format the paragraph as a whole.

You can introduce some emphasis ((Some document formatting
 systems and typographers are very dogmatic about what is
 "emphasis". pd2tex tries to subvert them as best as it can to make
 sure star gives bold (whether it's considered emphasis or not) and plus
 gives italic (whether that is emphasis or not). Usually one or the
 other will map to the underlying system's notion of emphasis and the
 other is created through explicit manipulation of fonts.)) formatting using special characters

  *bold*
  +italic+
  ~computeroutput~
  [REF]

Sometimes your document is so hairy that pd2tex gets confused in detecting whether star or plus really means emphasis (they could mean mathematical formula or even bulleted list). In these cases you can use following forms to disambiguate. One particular case where this is necessary is when you want to simply make just one character italic or computer output.

  <<tt: your computer text>>
  <<italic: your italic text>>
  <<bold: your bold text>>

If you are aiming only at using the LaTeX based formatter, you can also access the TeX math mode using dollar signs:

  Einstein's famous formula, $E=mc^2$, is very simple...

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