I'm trying to redefine the \emph
command to make text bolded in addition to being italic, but when I use
\newcommand{\bfemph}[1]{\textbf{\emph{#1}}}
\renewcommand{\emph}[1]{\bfemph{#1}}
I get an error message. The first command defining \bfemph
works on its own, but the latter does not.
I would really appreciate some help with this.
Best Answer
Rather than redefining
\emph
in terms of a copy of itself, it's better redefining it from scratch, using the standard definition as model; the standard definition is surprisingly simple:because it's
\em
that does the hard work. So we can simply doHowever, double emphasis is really too much: italic is sufficiently prominent. The advantage of redefining
\emph
in this way is that you can simply comment out those two lines and return to the default.Why doesn't your idea work? Because with those definitions, when TeX finds
it changes it into
and this becomes
that in turn becomes
…
Sorry, infinite loop:
\emph
will restart the machinery.