Supposedly, \emph is more "semantic" while \textit can be seen as an aspect of its implementation. LaTeX has no \strong — as opposed to, say, HTML which has both <em> and <strong>. So should I roll my own \strong or is it just overkill? Or is there some other, equivalent, command?
[Tex/LaTex] \textit is to \emph as \textbf is to…
boldemphasisitalic
Related Solutions
Those are very different commands even if the output happens to look the same.
If you want to emphasize a word or some text, use
\emph. Don't just make the text italic or bold. If needed, you may change the behaviour of\emphwhenever you wish in the preamble and the whole document will be adjusted accordingly.If you want to get italic text, use
\textit.\emphmight have a different effect, a package likeulemmight change it to underlining for instance.\emphmay be nested: emphasized text within emphasized text may be upright. In contrary, nesting\textitjust keeps the italic shape.Further, I rarely use physical font commands in my body text. I use them to define styles in the preamble and use the styles in the document afterwards, ensuring consistency and allowing changes to be easily made.
You can define your own \strong command which switches between strong and normal text like \emph does with italic:
\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\newcommand{\strong}[1]{\@strong{#1}}
\newcommand{\@@strong}[1]{\textbf{\let\@strong\@@@strong#1}}
\newcommand{\@@@strong}[1]{\textnormal{\let\@strong\@@strong#1}}
\let\@strong\@@strong
\makeatother
\begin{document}
Text \strong{strong text \strong{strong2 \strong{st-\strong{st}-st} yyy } xxxx} after
\end{document}
Or you can define different levels of "strong" using a counter:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\newcounter{stronglevel}
\setcounter{stronglevel}{1}
\newcommand{\strong}[1]{%
\csname strong\roman{stronglevel}\endcsname{{%
\advance\value{stronglevel} by 1\relax
#1%
}}%
}
\newcommand{\strongi}[1]{\textbf{#1}}
\newcommand{\strongii}[1]{{\blendcolors*{!50!red}\color{.}#1}}
\newcommand{\strongiii}[1]{\textsf{#1}}
\newcommand{\strongiv}[1]{{\blendcolors*{!50!red}\color{.}#1}}
\begin{document}
Text \strong{strong text \strong{strong2 \strong{st-\strong{st}-st} yyy } xxxx} after \strong{next}.
\end{document}
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Best Answer
The idea behind
\emphis that it provides a high level way for giving emphasis to a part of the text. High level in the sense it is “independent” of the actual implementation.The default behavior of
\emphis to use italics when in an upright context and upright when in an italics context, but this can be modified on a document’s basis (or by a package implementing a particular style). In particular, your question has no real answer:\emphand\textitbear no “abstract” relationship; the relationship is only at the default implementation level.This is different from stating some part of text is in italics; for instance, theorems are commonly typeset in italics and the styles use
\itshapefor this, not\em(the declarative form of\emph). Similarly they use\bfseriesfor the theorem tag (or\scshapeor whatever).You're free to define as many similar commands as you want. If your style requires a sort of “strong emphasis”, you can define
\strongas you please, maybe using\bfseriesin normal context and\extrabfseries(if your font supports it, the name is hypothetical) in a\strongcontext. Before doing this, think deeply whether your readers will be able to appreciate the difference between\emph{word}and\strong{word}(which I think they won't).