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I'm reporting what is potentially a minor bug. Here the bold font does not work:

**你好。**世界。

typeset **你好。**世界。

It occurs when we have:

  1. Chinese text ending in a full stop.
  2. Bold text highlighted using ** ** with the latter ** occurring after the full stop.
  3. No space after the latter **.

It can be "fixed" by adding a space after the full stop:

你好。 世界。

typeset **你好。** 世界。 But in Chinese writing, there should not be an additional space there (to my knowledge; others here can confirm/contradict this). The "space" is part of the full stop.

A workaround is moving the latter ** before the full stop, but then the full stop is not in bold (which is problematic if you want to highlight a whole sentence).

你好。世界。

typeset **你好**。世界。

It also arises with the non-Chinese full stop:

**hello.**world.

typeset **hello.**world. However, I think this is deliberate.

I expect this also affects Japanese.SE, but I didn't find a meta post about it there.

Update: This also affects other punctuation marks.

**你好吗？**世界。
**你好！**世界。
**你好：**世界。

typeset **你好吗？**世界。 The same workarounds work:

你好吗？ 世界。
你好吗？世界。

Update: It seems this problem is even worse in comments (examples in the comments below):

  1. **有没有问题**？hello world**有没有问题**？ looks like 有没有问题**？hello world有没有问题**？ (no space after the Chinese question mark)
  2. **有没有问题**？ hello world looks like **有没有问题**？ hello world (space after the Chinese question mark)
  3. 你好**有没有问题？**没有问题 looks like 你好**有没有问题？**没有问题 (requires no space after the Chinese question mark)

A workaround is to use the English question mark.

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  • Is there any point to have the full stop in bold? I know you mentioned it's to highlight a whole sentence but even if you leave the period out it doesn't make a big difference visually. – Mou某♦ Oct 28 '19 at 3:58
  • I said it was minor. (: Attention to detail, and all that. – Becky 李蓓♦ Oct 28 '19 at 4:11
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    I've tried to ping a Community Manager to get their attention on the matter. Hopefully we'll see some response soon. – Mou某♦ Oct 28 '19 at 10:56
  • @droooze Can you post a new feature-request thread detailing what you want? That’ll make it easier to process. – Mou某♦ Oct 29 '19 at 11:04
  • @user3306356 chinese.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/315/… it has a feature-request tag already – dROOOze Oct 29 '19 at 11:05
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    @droooze okay, upvote anything you haven’t yet and encourage others to do the same. I’ll do my best to get it implemented. – Mou某♦ Oct 29 '19 at 11:17
  • 有没有问题**？hello world有没有问题**？ – Becky 李蓓♦ Nov 7 '19 at 3:04
  • **有没有问题**？ hello world – Becky 李蓓♦ Nov 7 '19 at 3:06
  • 你好**有没有问题？**没有问题 – Becky 李蓓♦ Nov 7 '19 at 3:06
  • Related: Bold tag not applied to Chinese words correctly – Becky 李蓓♦ Jul 9 '20 at 11:40
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This is intentional, if unfortunate. For bold and italic formatting in text without spaces, the end of the formatted text must either not end in punctuation, or must be followed by punctuation.

So, this works: 你好世界。and so does this: 你好。。世界。but not this: **你好。**世界。

Sadly, altering this behavior - while convenient for the here-and-now - would make the text written here incompatible with other Markdown engines, including CommonMark - that's not only problematic for folks who move between this and other Markdown-friendly sites, it would likely break without warning if/when we ever upgrade our own implementation (to, say, CommonMark).

Trivia: GitHub appears to avoid this formatting in previews... But fails to render it after submission.

See also: CommonMark spec section 6.4: Emphasis and strong emphasis

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A Community Manager has added this to the:

Community Management Team's backlog

There is no ETA on when it will be looked at and/or taken care of, but at least we can be assured that it's not lost in the pile of meta posts.

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