After evaluation by users this proposal has been withdrawn

The current specification means that anything after e.g. a ** is bold. This will often lead to problems when these characters are used on their own. (e.g. ** is often put in text to mean (refer to the point elsewhere). The potential problem is the same for other inline markup.

Proposal

The proposal is to ignore any symetrical inline double markup which does not immediately proceed a non whitespace character. (** // __ ) but not ( [[ {{ )

That is:

 ** refer to my letter previously 

would print as is, but

 **refer to my letter

would come out as bold.

Comment

An even tighter requirement would logically be to insist the starting sequence would be

<whitespace><double-symbol><Non-white-space>

and final sequence the reverse. But whilst, this is probably logical, this is not part of the proposal, because the chance of mistakenly starting a block of bold text should be low and so an isolated '**' should be ignored, but it should be easy to stop a bold sequence, so an isolated ** when in a bold sequence should not be ignored.