Ohhh. Yeah, you only used it once. So using it twice is still open to experimentation. Hackers, have at it!
We could use ∗these∗ instead. U+2217, asterisk operator.
Interestingly, U+2731, heavy asterisk, is stripped by HN it seems.
But to be honest, none of them feel the same as the one true *. I looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... hoping there was a way to elevate and scale down a character by some special code to make it look like a regular asterisk but didn't see any. Also, with unusual code points, font support is generally lacking so to some readers of HN, the above mentioned variations will probably render as something such as just squares. Furthermore, one of those I used above mess with apparent line spacing for me.
"Furthermore, the ones I used above mess with apparent line spacing."
Yeah, yeah, that's the glitch I was talking about. Dropped 2-3 lines on me and I couldn't even see the character.
Note: We could use the second one in comments the way people use asterisks. Just to screw with people who will wonder why ours are showing. If they ask about it, just act like it looks fine on your end: all italics. Haha.
They look the best as you said and they are also the ones that ∗didn't∗ mess with apparent line spacing.
Regarding messing with people, use the browser dev tools to replace them with the italics open and end tags, then screenshot the result and say to people, "what are you talking about? looks fine to me" and link said screenshot. I'm affraid our scheme will soon be thwarted by other HNers though who will jump in to say "yeah, I see asterisk as well" and then someone else will say "they are using a different unicode character".
I want to say * nix, and then to *italicize * nix*.
I want to say * nix, and then to italicize nix.
That also left things in italics, which I'll close now.
Test 2:
I want to say * nix, and then to *italicize *nix*.
I want to say * nix, and then to italicize nix.
Again, this left italics on.
So there doesn't seem to be a way to do what I was trying to do. This is why I said "unix" rather than, you know...
* NIX
NIX*
NIX*
\NIX*
\\NIX*
(print (+ * (i "NIX")))
EDIT: Darn, I was almost sure the last one would activate one of pg's old routines here. Note that the asterisk disappeared when a backslash came first. Did get NIX italicized but couldn't get rid of the space. Let me try something...
EDIT 2: Didn't work. May not be possible due to formatting rule here. Be nice if they modified it to add an escape code or something to let us drop an arbitrary asterisk.