Inline syntax

This is italic and so is this and this. You can also make an entire phrase into italics. Really though, italics are best reserved for the Titles of Books and Other Things. According to Grammarly, italics can may be used for:

1. Long written works

2. Periodical names

3. Moves, plays, and television shows

4. Podcasts and radio shows

5. Music albums, operas, and long musical compositions

6. Apps and video games

7. Works of art

8. Legal cases

9. Names of large vehicles (ships, aircraft, spaceships, trains)

10. Foreign words

11. Scientific names

12. When discussing specific words or letters

13. Unspoken thoughts and internal monologues

14. Emphasis

Of course when using italics to mark a title it should be not be intermixed with bold text or underlined text. The 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style says

All punctuation marks should appear in the same font – roman or italic – as the main or surrounding text, except for punctuation that belongs to a title or an exclamation in a different font. This departure from Chicago’s former usage serves both simplicity and logic.

There is little on when to use bold text and the little there is suggests that it’s valid in creative writing but otherwise should be avoided. Another suggestion was to use either italics or bold, but not both, and to make the choice based upon the type-face you have selected. The logic here is that some font-faces have a weak italic and so bold is a better substitute. Personally, I use bold sparingly, so I am not concerned about using it over much.

My understanding of the underline is that it’s a relic from the past. Prior to the computer, underlining words, phrases, titles, etc. was considered a valid replacement for the use of italics. This is because prior to the computer papers were written by hand or on a typewriter and neither of them had a good way of producing italicized texted. A pen could be used to add an underline to a paper once typed. Thus style guides would allow for this usage. However, with computers it’s trivial to add italic text and so the underline has lost much of it’s purpose in life.

There is the even less used strike through and we need not much, or at all!

For expressing code, terminal commands, and other similar things we have the code directive. This sets the font to monospace and usually adds some additional visual indicators. It does not add syntax highlighting the way it’s cousin the code block does, so this is best reserved for small snippets. I would not want to describe more than a single line or so in this manner.

There is also the verbatim directive in org-mode, however this renders the same way as the code directive in HTML so there is little need for both. You can of course set the verbatim directive to use a different HTML element by altering org-html-markup-alist. I might set verbatim up to use the <key> tag in the future.

Orgmode has native support for^superscript and_subscript. If the text to be raised or lowered exceeds a single word you can wrap it in braces^{Like in this example}. I do not write much mathematical or scientific material so subscript will likely be used little and superscript little more.

One use of the superscript that I suspect might get some use in the form of footnotes.¹ unfortunately, getting your footnotes to appear to the side as in the style of Edward Tufte is not easy. This means that a client-side version of the side note will need to be implemented that uses JavaScript.²

Footnotes: