: In a sentence ending with a bold or italicised word, does the period need to be bold/italicised too? Maybe this will be considered a bit of a nitpicking argument, but I constantly find myself

@Bryan765

All the answers so far are so long, I thought I'd give my quick thought.

I always "unbold" before ending the sentence with a punctuation mark. Why wouldn't you? The punctuation mark should be in tone with the sentence, not with the preceding word.

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@Annie732

The answer to which is preferable is informed by the context of the sentence or paragraph. The most important elements get the most creative freedom.

If "Today I met a lot of interesting people." is a headline, for example, I would argue the designer has a lot more latitude about following the rules. But, if it is buried in an annual report or if your intended audience is a group of English grad students, I would advocate to follow the rules exactly!

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@Carla748

Semantically, the typeface of the punctuation should be determined by its degree of association with the preceding word. In the example given for the Chicago Manual of Style, the exclamation mark after Banzai! belongs to the word itself, rather than marking the end of the enclosing sentence, so it should clearly be italicized, but that doesn't mean that all punctuation marks following words should be treated thus semantically. If text were highlighted by changing the background color, an effect which is available in markdown but not very visible on this site, it would be strange to have the punctuation of a sentence highlighted when most of the sentence wasn't.

Typographically, however, things are more complicated. The difficulty is that even when semantics would suggest that a punctuation mark shouldn't be italicized, attempting to render it upright can sometimes look ugly! Semantically, putting the punctuation mark in italic when the sentence isn't is semantically nasty! Upgright punctuation is semantically more correct, and if spaced properly, should be visually fine as well. Unfortunately, getting the spacing right is often difficult.

It should be noted, btw, that the Chicago Manual of Style is directed at people writing for newspapers and other hastily-typeset publications. Many of the practices advocated therein are intended not to yield the best results, but rather to yield consistent results which are not reliant upon the judgment of people setting text. If the typeface of a mark following an italicized word is varied according to semantics, then it's possible for a typesetter who misinterprets the sentence to get it wrong. If the typestyle is determined by rule, then it says nothing semantically and thus can't be semantically wrong.

I would suggest that when taking control of document typography, one should use very different rules from what the Chicago Manual of Style would advocate, but be prepared to hand-tweak a lot of things.

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@Cody3331749

The older convention was that the style of punctuation matched the immediately preceding context:



That's the Chicago Manual of Style (3rd edition, 1911), but the same convention can be seen in a French equivalent: Désiré Greffier, Les règles de la composition typographique (Paris: A. Muller, 1897), pp. 54-55.

And it's not only an older convention, as the Art. Lebedev Studio continues to advocate this same principle:



Having said that, as noted in other answers, Bringhurst seems to have imposed a different standard -- or at least he is widely cited with the instruction to ignore context and use 'upright' punctuation. His preference gets some interesting discussion, historical context, and push-back in the Typophile forum.

See also these Q&A's from elsewhere in the Stack Exchange network:


"Italics emphasis and punctuation" [TeX.SE]
"Italics and punctuation" [EL&L.SE]

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@Merenda852

Perhaps this point of view can help you:

What is the result of writing some word with an italic font (I prefer!) or an bold font? It is a kind of citing, something like "This part is important"!.

Now I think the rule is simple: is the dot (.) or question mark (?) or ! or ... part of the cited element or not? If it is part, use the italic or bold font, if not use the normal font.

Different fonts have different looksso it can be that your choosen combination looks ugly (that is clearly opinion based!), then change it. I---but you must not!---prefer not to highlight the closing dot etc.

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@Harper654

I am referencing a physical book The Elements of Typographic Style, version 3.2 by Robert Bringhurst:


5.1.2 Use analphabetic symbols and diacritcs that are in tune with the basic font.


and


5.3.2 Use upright (i.e., "roman") rather than sloped parentheses, brackets and braces, even if the context is italic.


That is the only guidance I could find in that text that is relevant, but does not explicitly address the full stop question. I would leave the styling as the base font, unless there were an italic word or phrase at the end of a sentence that ended in a question mark or exclamation point. Those I would style italic to match the words.

I think a bold word followed by an exclamation point has some other editorial issues to do with the writing itself.

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@Lee3735518

I think it's great that you're being so detailed. The smallest of details are noticed by the reader, even if it's just subconsciously. I'm sure there are a lot of different opinions, and I'm sure that in the end it comes down to personal preference, but I would say you only include formatting on elements that are part of the nested statement.


This isn’t a cool statement.


The apostrophe is bold as it is part of the statement being emphasized.


Oh my gosh this is an amazing statement (not really).


The parentheses (and period) are not bold as they are not part of the nested statement.

You can see more of this in the wonderful book Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick. When going over parentheses, he says: “these marks should not adopt the formatting of the surrounded material.” Unless the formatting causes the text to awkwardly run into the marks in which case you should carry over the formatting to those marks. This depends on the font you use, so check first then edit as needed.



While he is talking about parentheses, this rule / guideline extends to other punctuation marks.

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