Gentle emphasis ~…~
Gentle emphasis gives a word or phrase a different appearance from regular text without standing out. Unlike heavy emphasis it is not supposed to catch the attention of someone who just glances over the text.
Gentle emphasis is most often achieved with an italic font. Small caps are an alternative. Switching from a serif font to a sans-serif version from the same font superfamily can also be a viable option.
How to
Mark both the start and the end of the gently emphasized text with a tilde ~
as in the example below. Gentle emphasis is phrase markup, so the start and end of gentle emphasis must be within the same block.
If you want to gently emphasize multiple consecutive paragraphs, you have to start and end each paragraph with a tilde. This is not recommended though, because nothing is really distinct anymore, if everything is emphasized.
Example
Do not forget to ~shake~ the martini.
Do not forget to shake the martini.
For developers
When Aneamal is translated to HTML, gentle emphasis is turned into an HTML i element. The above example becomes
Do not forget to <i>shake</i> the martini.
Browsers usually render the i element italic by default, but you can change its appearance with CSS. For instance, the following CSS rules remove the default italic style and express gentle emphasis through small caps instead.
i {
font-style: inherit;
font-variant: small-caps;
}