The italics are properly formatted when I publish a chapter, but at some point my italics change to _underscored text_ and it's driving me up the wall. Any idea what's causing that, and how to make it stop?
You have an errant space at one end of your italics. For example, you're trying to do: I [really] want that cookie. But instead, you're doing: I [really ]want that cookie. For whatever reason, the interface can't figure out how to italicize that space, and so it rejects it and puts underscores (which might be part of the basic formatting system, but I don't use that). Anyway -- check your spaces, and you should fix things up.
This should only happen when you use the RTE option that offers you that little menu to choose the formatting and shows you directly how the content should look. After saving the chapter with RTE activated, the content is converted into plain Markdown and then saved to the database. This conversion usually causes such issues. Displaying the Markdown loaded from the database is very reliable. So if you don't mind formatting your context in plain Markdown directly as you write, deactivating RTE (on your Settings page; don't do it when you're currently editing a chapter) might be an option for you. (It also allows to use Markdown features that won't work using the RTE.) Then you would write This is *italics* and this **bold** and this ***italics and bold***. or This is _italics_ and this __bold__ and this ___italics and bold___. or This is *italics* and this __bold__ and this _**italics and bold**_. It should also work to do something like This is_ italics_ and this__ bold__. However, you would only see the result after you saved the chapter.
