On 5/12/05, Nicolas Weeger &lt;nicolas.weeger(a)laposte.net&gt; wrote: Not quite true; it could be fixed automatically by having the existing parser code apply the rule that it does now, and write a <nowiki> around the ' that it interprets literally. It wouldn't be quite semantically perfect, but articles would keep their appearances (and it could even be applied before/without removing the offending code). I agree that <nowiki> is somewhat unwieldy, but it's a solution to the problem that already exists (and always has) and doesn't require mangling the grammar so that it's imposible to know whether ''' means ''' or not. A slightly more radical approach that just crossed my mind would be to add a token reminiscent of TeX's "\/" which would produce no output, but break up tokens. For the sake of readability in this email, let's imagine it's ";" * l';''italic''bold => "l'<i>italic</i>bold" * l'';'italic''bold => "l<i>'italic</i>bold" gives you full control without the 17 characters of <nowiki></nowiki>.