B = STRONG and I = EM…. Why ?

I noticed this happening today. You choose the Bold button, and it CAPITALIZES and BOLDS your word. You choose Italics, and it bolds your word in whatever case it is in. What a mess. I tried it from the HTML editor, makes no difference. I wonder if WP plans a fix soon?

lightspeed, the problem is not with WordPress, but with your theme’s css:

div.entry-content strong,div.comments ol.commentlist strong{text-transform:uppercase;}

text-transform:uppercase is the culprit.

I’ve been having the same problem with blox.txt making my italics appear bold. I had already been through the style.css file looking for the problem, but couldn’t find it. Just did a search for “text-transform” in the file, and could only find “text-transform:uppercase” but no instances of “text-transform:bold” — and yet that’s what’s happening. I’m baffled.

The bold italics (em) is the result of this in your theme’s style.css:

div.entry-content em,div.comments ol.commentlist em{font-style:normal;font-weight:700;}

font-weight:700 is the culprit (it is another way to make text bolder and 700 is the same as bold):

https://www.w3schools.com/Css/pr_font_weight.asp

I just solved the problem. In the “write post” page, choose “HTML” rather than “Visual” and you’ll see the <em> tag which you can change to <i> for italics.

Since I refer to titles frequently and need italics, I would prefer not to have to go through all that hassle every time I want actual italics, so if anyone knows a way to reconfigure the theme (blog.txt in my case) so it actually makes italics mean italics, I would be very grateful.

… or you could just adjust the theme you’ve chosen to use to display how you’d like (iridiax’s last answer was help up, so you probably missed it earlier).

Thank you. Yes, that reply wasn’t there when I wrote mine. Would you mind clarifying exactly what I need to change, please? In the section

div.entry-content em,div.comments ol.commentlist em{font-style:normal;font-weight:700;}

I should delete the “font-weight:700;” but is that all? Should the “font-style:normal” read “font-style:italic” instead?

Just delete all of this:

div.entry-content em,div.comments ol.commentlist em{font-style:normal;font-weight:700;}

Your theme designer is a bit unorthodox to say the least! By default, em is rendered as italic and non-bold, so why the designer changed it I have no idea.

I deleted that section from my stylesheet file, but the text still shows up on the blog as bold!

It’s so maddening. I looked at so many themes and finally chose this one, made some modifications, was really happy with it, but this italics thing is driving me nuts!

well, keep fixing it if you like it… but fact is, the problem is with the theme, as strong is bold by default, and em is italic by default, which means somewhere in your theme’s style.css they’re being re-defined still.

that’s 100% a theme issue.

Have you tried an em on regular, non-link, non-list text in a post and is it still bold? After editing your css, you should refresh your browser and/or empty your browser cache to ensure that the browser is using the updated stylesheet.

You can also try this bit of redundant css, but it may not override whatever css is still making em bold:

div.entry-content em,div.comments ol.commentlist em{font-style:italic;font-weight:normal;}