# Add support for block level italics and bold BBCode
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [January 23, 2020, 11:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590 "2020-01-23T23:29:24Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jack2](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jack2)
#### Post date: [January 23, 2020, 11:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590/1 "2020-01-23T23:29:25Z")
Consider this text:
```plaintext
[i]
Italic - First line
Italic - Second line
[/i]
```
It renders as:
Italic - First line
Italic - Second line
Now consider the same text with an empty line:
```plaintext
[i]
Italic - First line
Italic - Second line
[/i]
```
It renders as:
[i]
Italic - First line
Italic - Second line
[/i]
(the BBCode fails)
Is this the intended behavior?
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [January 23, 2020, 11:53pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590/2 "2020-01-23T23:53:58Z")
I don’t think `[i]` is intended as multi-line markup? In other words, do this:
```
[i]Italic - First line[/i]
[i]Italic - Second line[/i]
```
---
### Author:  [@Remah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Remah)
#### Post date: [January 24, 2020, 12:14am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590/3 "2020-01-24T00:14:26Z")
AFAIK, BBCode is not fully specified to cover this but all the relevant BBCode examples are on single lines. So it is unlikely to be a bug.
The normal way to enable multi-line tagging is to add HTML breaks `
` to make the extra lines explicit between the tags. That works here too:
`bbcode [i] italic with
html line break [/i] example.`
bbcode italic with
html line break example.
---
### Author:  [@jack2](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jack2)
#### Post date: [January 24, 2020, 8:39am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590/4 "2020-01-24T08:39:10Z")
@Remah, adding a ` ` also works:
```plaintext
[i]
Italic - First line
Italic - Second line
[/i]
```
Renders as:
Italic - First line
Italic - Second line
@codinghorror, I think you’re right, as the following markup doesn’t have the issue:
```plaintext
[code]
Code block - First line
Code block - Second line
[/code]
```
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [January 28, 2020, 1:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590/5 "2020-01-28T01:23:19Z")
Yeah italic bbcode block is not implemented as a multiline. This is current intended behavior. Same goes for bold. The reason I did this is that `` and `` also are treated as inline vs block level tags in html.
I am open to expanding this use case if there are enough requests for it, but as it stands it is behaving as designed.
---
### Author:  [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking)
#### Post date: [January 28, 2020, 2:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-support-for-block-level-italics-and-bold-bbcode/139590/6 "2020-01-28T02:30:29Z")
Writing multiple paragraphs of italic / bold text without putting in the effort to put the formatting tag on every paragraph is one of the kinds of low effort-to-annoyance-ratio forum posts that I don’t think should be encouraged.