I’m editing the document and find that sometimes the text refuses to display italics. Here’s the Scrivener text:
And then, using the default Pandoc=>ePub compile (no customizations) this is the result:
All of this text is formatted the same way in Scrivener:
I can’t figure out why the list refuses to display italicized text upon Compile.
I found that deleting the tabs (!) generated italicized text in the example. Why would tabs have anything to do with this??
So this is mainly a Pandoc Markdown question, and I would even go further and say it is a conceptual question as well, rather than purely technical. Nothing about how Scrivener works is going to be of any bearing here, as will most often be the case for how you type in text in the editor, as characters (and tab stops and so forth), unless you’ve got some wild compile settings going on.
To think upon the conceptual, it seems the main question here is: how do I make lots of text in this section italic. I see entire lines, and all lines (save for the heading) wrapped fully in italics, from the first to the last letter—and whenever I see that, my first question is: is this the right tool for the job? Bearing in mind asterisk marking in Markdown is primarily one of emphasis, like I just used it there, are we really emphatically stating all of these bullets and paragraphs?
Probably not—so this is a stylistic choice, and if it is widespread choice, perhaps even something where the entire chunk of text in the binder is meant to work this way, then I start thinking about section level formatting.
Before getting into that though, what you saw specifically is the result of invalid syntax. You can’t put emphatic markers around list markers—the result won’t be a list. Instead you’ve got one line that begins with “1.”, that isn’t actually a list line, and the rest is tab indented which indicates a code block—which makes sense, and explains why raw Markdown passed through as well. You create code blocks by tabbing each line. You also create indented list items with tabs—but that only works if the whole looks like a list, and in your case it didn’t really look like a list, nor did it strictly follow the rules of being a list.
Here is what a list would look like where each line is emphatic:
1. *Major list element*
a. *Minor list element*
b. *Another one...*
2. *Second major element*
But going back to the conceptual thoughts above, this kind of forcing is something I always try to avoid. To me, what you typed in makes no sense, are we “shouting” every line? There are a few ways we could more meaningfully declare our intentions with this list:
::: {.italic-list}
1. Major list element
a. Minor list element
b. Another one...
2. Second major element
:::
I’d argue “italic-list” is a bit of a generic and less useful way to refer to this. A better name would be one that describes the document structure, but I don’t know what that means to you. An example is “block quote”, that’s a structural element. What structural element is portrayed by printing this section in italic text? Having good meaningful names will make things easier on you later on. You’ll come back to this a few years later and know what you meant, it also decouples presentation from the meaning, which always a good principle.
We could stop there, and you could start going in and adding these markers around everything that needs italics—but again I think we can do better. That’s good for the list here or there that needs to be different from the rest, but if this whole binder item needs to be italic, we should address that with CSS, and at as high a level as we can. Then, only if we need to, start adding markup to the outline, and only if that fails (binder items that have bulk italic text and regular Roman text) should we start looking to markup-based solutions like the above. So let’s take a look at Sigil, and see what we can do about it.
Here we have some HTML from a properly formatted section:
<section id="article-7-exclusions" class="level3" data-number="1.0.1">
<h3 data-number="1.0.1">Article 7 Exclusions</h3>
<p>New Article 7</p>
<p>Dri srung gronk ozlint; zeuhl la, ti dri. Relnag xi nalista dri lydran wynlarce, prinquis zorl nalista.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Re teng thung; kurnap fli rintax ti nalista gra athran epp. Er lamax berot cree dri.
<ol type="a">
<li>La, morvit urfa quolt… er prinquis, pank obrikt quolt gen ma dri tharn athran relnag xi erc wex velar.</li>
We have a few hooks in here we could make use of with CSS. There is the #article-7-exclusions, which will be unique to this one chunk of text, and .level3, which will be common to all sections of text that fall after h3 headings. Maybe one of those is useful if the answer to this is either very sporadic or very procedural. If we know for a fact only article 7, 14 and 21 are going to need this treatment, then we could name them in our CSS and be done with it:
#article-7-exclusions,
#article-14-something-else,
#article-21-lastly {
font-style: italic;
}
#article-7-exclusions em,
#article-14-something-else em,
#article-21-lastly em {
font-style: normal;
}
If you try pasting that into the stylesheet.css file in Sigil, and checking out the xhtml file that has article-7 in it, you should see it working! And thanks to the second set of declarations, we’re saying any actual emphasis in these sections should use Roman characters, as is typical in most typesetting traditions where emphasis falls within text that is italic for other reasons.
As for the very procedural, here is how we’d address that:
.level3 {
font-style: italic;
}
.level3 em {
font-style: normal;
}
Much simpler! In most cases you’ll want something like this in your CSS, rather than a manually curated list like the above. I’m not a huge fan of that, because again we are kind of forcing it. We’re saying “article-7” is italic in the same way we were saying every line is italic with asterisks. Plus, it’s fragile, in that we have to manually maintain it, and heading revisions will require editing it.
So if the very procedural doesn’t work, and this other approach isn’t the greatest, that leaves tagging structural areas of the document meaningfully—just a step higher than doing so in the text. Ideally, what we’d want to be able to do is something like this:
<section id="article-7-exclusions" class="level3 italic-section" data-number="1.0.1">
<h3 data-number="1.0.1">Article 7 Exclusions</h3>
<p>New Article 7</p>
...
Note that the class for this section is now marked as “italic-section” (which is again terribly generic, but I’ll leave that to you), as well as being “level3”. Then our CSS could be:
.italic-section {
font-style: italic;
}
.italic-section em {
font-style: normal;
}
The thing is, Pandoc is inserting the <section> element for us, it isn’t anywhere in the markup. Thankfully, Pandoc has some neat little corners. If we wrap an entire section, including its heading, in a <div> and give that div attributes, it recognises our intent and moves that markup to the right place. So what we’re looking for in markup is:
::: {.italic-section}
### Article 7 Exclusions
New Article 7
Dri srung gronk ozlint; zeuhl la, ti dri. Relnag xi nalista dri lydran wynlarce, prinquis zorl nalista.
1. Re teng thung; kurnap fli rintax ti nalista gra athran epp. Er lamax berot cree dri.
a. La, morvit urfa quolt... er prinquis, pank obrikt quolt gen ma dri tharn athran relnag xi erc wex velar.
<SNIP>
:::
If you give that a try, you’ll find you get exactly what was indicated as ideal, in the HTML. Paste the revised CSS example into stylesheet.css in Sigil, and it’ll not only be indicated in the HTML, but formatted as you want.
We could type that in ourselves, but a better way of doing it would be to finally bring Scrivener into the equation, and let it do what it does best: make such kinds of high level decisions easier to manage without having to copy and paste bits of markup over and over into different outline elements:
Go into Project ▸ Project Settings..., and in Section Types, create a new type for “Section Text - Italic” (again, choosing a name that better suits the content or purpose).
Save the settings, and assign this new type to the Article 7 binder item.
Open the compiler, and double-click on the compile Format in the left sidebar to edit it.
Create a new Section Layout, probably from “Text Section”, which will be used to insert the markup for us.
In its Prefix tab, type in ::: {.italic-section} followed by one or two carriage returns.
For Suffix type in one or two carriage returns, and then :::
We might as well paste in the CSS we want (from above) into the Pandoc Options pane while we’re here.
Hint: you may want to copy and paste from the stylesheet.css file in Sigil, from a previous compile, because Pandoc only prints all of that stock CSS if you don’t supply any yourself.
Save the Format, and make sure to remember to assign the new section type to the layout we’ve created.
Give that a test compile, and you should be done. Any new section you tag this way with the new Type will be italicised in full. No spamming asterisks all over the place and risk breaking syntax like lists.
Hopefully in all of the tests and iterations above, you find one solution that works for you. Depending on whether you have fifteen level 3 sections in one binder item, or only some text within Article 7 needs to be italic—whatever the case may be, you can always fall back to typing in the ::: markup ::: yourself, if a good procedural answer doesn’t arise.
Wow, that makes me soooo eager to take up Pandoc.
Yes, basically when it comes to making ebooks, Pandoc generally produces a much better result to work from, and most importantly for far less effort than it takes using Scrivener’s native formatting tools. To do the above it would take a whole mess of styles and counter-styles, as much, if not more, section layout setup, and a lot more knowledge of the compiler in general. There would be some very tricky things to sort out, like emphasis using Roman lettering when occurring with larger spans of italic text.
Whereas this solution, once you peel back all of the exploration and variations discussed above, boils down to something very clear and simple that we can insert around section layouts:
::: {.make-this-whole-section-italic}
(Fifty paragraphs of diverse content, with tables, images, lists, etc.)
:::
Have fun making that all work with that little work otherwise. 
Are you saying a plain vanilla layout won’t compile a section in italics?
(Sorry, I didn’t get through all that you wrote above. It would take a couple days work to digest it.)
Well then, to point out the bulk of what was being discussed: most of it wasn’t even talking about Pandoc, but going over how it’s a good idea to make high level formatting decisions with high level tools when you can, and the best ways to do that in an ebook.
All right, so to get one thing straight, I was not saying that italics, as a font variant, should only ever be used for emphasis! I think the intention is being confused with the tool, here. When I said “you’re using emphasis in a way that doesn’t fit”, I didn’t mean you’re using italics in a way that doesn’t fit—that’s your choice and your style guide to design and establish (and personally I think that’s a good approach to the problem you describe). I was saying emphasis, the tool, with asterisks, isn’t the best way to establish a high level design decision. Really, no different than I would say to a word processor user manually changing the font variant to italics across whole sections of text. That’s also a less than optimal approach to solving this design problem.
This statement, and the solution of using higher-level sectional semantics, is of course the spiritual cousin of:
\begin{updated-article}
First line.
Second line.
\end{updated-article}
…where you’ve designed your preamble so that the updated-article environment prints its contents in italic font. This is what you would want to do, rather than the equivalent of wrapping every line in asterisks:
\emph{First line}
\emph{Second line}
Hopefully that helps to map a familiar concept over to unfamiliar territory.
In the ebook realm, the <div> method I described is most often the best way of handling shorter chunks of text in a longer section where not all of the text in that section falls under this semantic (only exceptions being cases where HTML has dedicated markup for that purpose, like <blockquote>). Divs with class names are the spiritual cousin to LaTeX environments. And when whole sections needs this treatment, marking that <section> as being special and needing italic formatting is the most semantic way to handle it in an ebook. In your example, the “New Article 7” line is not within this range, nor is the heading, so this method is probably best (rather than the section type/layout approach):
### Article 7 Exclusions
New Article 7
::: {.updated-article}
The following are excluded from the application of rules...
1. Exclude from application...
a. Family members of the employer...
<ETC>
:::
And back to normal semantics.
In using the best tool for the job (sectional semantics), we avoid pitfalls that can occur from trying to wrap every single line, no matter how complex it may be (multi-level lists for instance) in inline emphasis (the tool!) formatting. And that’s not even getting into the human cost, where typing every line with asterisks is more labour-intensive than just marking the whole section with a few simple markers.
You could even use a paragraph style to automatically insert the ::: div ::: markers for you, keeping the editor cleaner, but that would only work if these areas only ever contain simple text rather than other styles.
I also didn’t go about providing a solution for easily fixing the sections marked with asterisks. This is not too hard to clean up:
⌘F / Ctrl+F and set the Replace All scope to “Selected Text”.^(\t)*\*(.+)\*$$1$2Replace All.That will preserve tabs that fall at the beginning of the line, and only remove asterisks if they are (tabulation excluded) the very first and very last characters on a line. You will note the Find part also works as a search, which can be used to find sections and quickly convert them to sectional semantics, even project-wide via the Project Search tool set to regex mode (though you would of course only want to do that after adding the sectional semantics, or setting section types).
Depending on how much of this there is, I wouldn’t suspect it being more than an afternoon of work, particularly if you use macro software like Keyboard Maestro, which could insert the ::: div ::: markup around the selected text, then clean out the asterisks (it also does regex, so you don’t need Scrivener for that), and jump to the next matching line, in one shortcut.