# Improving quoting quote accuracy

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/improving-quoting-quote-accuracy/355053>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [February 28, 2025, 4:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/improving-quoting-quote-accuracy/355053 "2025-02-28T16:34:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![curi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e68b1a/32.png) [@curi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/curi)\
**Post date:** [March 3, 2025, 3:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/improving-quoting-quote-accuracy/355053/10 "2025-03-03T15:43:40Z")

</div>

> [@Jagster](#):
>
> What I select is what I want to quote, and software shound never change that.

Take a look at this example:

 ![The image shows a forum post by "Elliot," featuring a quote displaying the syntax for bold and italics formatting, alongside buttons for quoting, editing, and copying the text. (Captioned by AI)](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/b/5/4/b54f4550471b561400b7734a93cbc7057f5ddcc4.png)

I selected a bold word but that is not what I got.

Why? Because under the hood the original looks like `before **Bold sentence with words.** after` but that is not displayed to the user doing the quoting. They saw rich text, selected a bold word in rich text, and expected it to come out bold. They didn’t see themselves as selecting a section of markdown text that didn’t include asterisks.

Also, observe this:

 ![This image shows a screenshot of a webpage with a highlighted quote box displaying content from an article by Elliot. (Captioned by AI)](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/5/2/f/52f909c395bb4d40d72dfd6537b717f28b901caa.png)

You call this the software not changing the selection and just being literal. But these results only make sense in terms of rich text. In terms of the underlying markdown, the software changed it on me. My selection didn’t include the closing `**`, but the forum software added that in.

If you want people to quote from raw markdown, display it to them and let them select it directly to quote, I guess. Having them select rich text but get quotes (partly) based on markdown is confusing and leads to results users don’t intend.

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/improving-quoting-quote-accuracy/355053)._