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Included in:

- user-manual: text formatting
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Just as we emphasize certain words and phrases when we speak, we can emphasize them in text with formatting.
This formatting, such as bold or monospace, is indicated by surrounding letters, words, or phrases with simple markup.
When Asciidoctor processes text enclosed by formatting markup, the markup is replaced by the corresponding HTML or XML tags, depending on your backend, during the <<user-manual#quotes,quotes substitution phase>>.

.Text formatting versus quotes
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The original AsciiDoc processor calls this markup and its related features _quotes_, _quotes substitutions_, and _quoted text_.
However, in the Asciidoctor documentation, we refer to the text formatting markup as, you guessed it, text formatting.
When you need to control when text formatting is applied to certain blocks, the substitution attribute is still named `quotes`, but we're considering changing this to a more semantic name in a future Asciidoctor version.
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Continue reading to learn how to format letters, words or phrases with the following styles:

- [x] bold
- [x] italic
- [x] curved (smart) quotation marks and apostrophes
- [x] subscript and superscript
- [x] monospace
- [x] highlighted, built-in and custom CSS styles

CAUTION: You may not always want these symbols to indicate text formatting.
In those cases, you'll need to use additional markup to <<user-manual#preventing-substitutions,escape the text formatting markup>>.
