# Punctuation marks causing Markdown bold display to fail

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/markdown/407071>\
**Category:** Bug\
**Created:** [July 8, 2026, 12:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/markdown/407071 "2026-07-08T12:58:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 8

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**Author:** ![renato](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/renato/32/383632_2.png) [@renato](https://meta.discourse.org/u/renato)\
**Post date:** [July 12, 2026, 10:02pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/markdown/407071/8 "2026-07-12T22:02:48Z")

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Per CommonMark, a `**` can only _close_ strong emphasis if it’s part of a [right-flanking delimiter run](https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#right-flanking-delimiter-run). A delimiter preceded by punctuation (`.`) and followed by a word character (`t`) is _not_ right-flanking, so it can’t close. `markdown-it` parses it as literal text. Same rule applies to `*`, `_`, and `__`.

I think there’s not much we can do about this, we’re following the spec, but this showed me we had a bug with the rich editor markdown serializer: if you used the UI to build this situation (\*\*text.\*\*text), it displayed correctly on the rich editor, but cooked as plain-text. [This PR](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/41597) addressed this scenario by expelling the punctuation from the marked area, so it becomes **text**.text (` **text**.text`).

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