The New Smart Formatting?

jregan

I noticed the new Smart Formatting option enabled in the latest release (1.7.16) of the Archive. What does it do?

ctietze

I've yet to spend more time elaborating on the help page and adding GIFs and shooting a video, so:

In an empty document, straight-forwardly, it will insert the ** for you, and you can type between the emboldening asterisks. That is also the non-smart behavior.

Now when you're next to a word, it'll embolden that word. Let ˇ be your cursor, then you get:

hello ˇword    →⌘B→    hello **word**

If you have multiple words selected, it will embolden them. That's not new. But now it enlarges the selection to full words (so you don't need to correct if you drag-to-select and release the mouse too early). It also trims spaces, which Markdown doesn't like to embolden when trailing, so you don't get **word⎵** (where ⎵ is a space).

If you select a range in text that already has bold markers, it'll remove these, first. So you can combine existing bold text ranges into 1 with a single press.

**hello** dear **world**   →⌘B→   **hello dear world**

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Smart and non-smart behavior both now more accurately detect existing bold/italics, especially when **_nested_ __*weirdly*__**.