question: modifying face (bold, italic, underline) in draft news articles

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

Emacs 21.3, Gnus 5.10.6 on SPARC Solaris 2.8

Dear all,

        When writing draft articles, I want to make some words bold,
        underlined, or italic.

        I have found that '*' surrounding a word makes gnus see it as
        bold when reading the posted article, and that '_' around a
        word makes it underlined.

        Emacs also provides bold (M-g b) and underline (M-g u)
        commands which act on selected text, and insert ASCII escape
        sequences in front of each selected character in draft
        articles, but work properly visually in other Emacs buffers.

I wonder whether there is an answer for the following 2 problems:

  My first question is whether there is a way of specifying bold or
italic face for selected draft article text, or whether one has to add
'*' or '_' around the text manually. Similarly, is there an italic
symbol or command?

  My second question is if there is a simple means to make the justify
function realize that justification should not add a '*' at the start
of each justified line is the first or second line happens to have a
bold indicator '*' as its first character.

Best regards,
        Gernot
-- 
G Hassenpflug RASC, Kyoto University