There are four types of text formattings defined in WikiText (<-- camelcaps do not indicate a link). These are emphasis, strong, underline, strikethrough and `typewriter font`.

These text formattings must obey certain rules. They must enclose the surrounded text without whitespace: { some text } is not typewriter font, but "some text" in curly braces. Use `some text` to generate typewriter font.

This disambiguates inline markup at the start of a paragraph from environment / paragraph types / (useless slash to confuse the parser).

Text formatting markup can contain multiple words and even line breaks. The markup characters may only follow/precede special characters, such as whitespace and sentence characters (bold vs not_underlined_).

Mathematical formulas can also confuse the parser:

a * b * c = c*b*a (nothings bold here)

a b c = c b a (this is markup ... but who'd write like this and not mean it)

Don't even think about doing inline markups with some s///g expressions. The verbatim inline tag doesn't like it. *this* is not bold but this is.

Links are simple: google-fu or heise.de. dont@bother.me is a mailto: link.

Force image links to be inlined by using or .

With google.com you can generate section links, even if the target looks like something else. With localhost you can generate external links, even if the target doesn't seem to be.

Links and verbatim obey the same rules as the text formatting markups.