[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by hobnail

If you're using Sigil you can use its TagMechanic plugin, which is essentially the same as the Editing Toolbag that JSWolf pointed to.

I'd forgotten about the strong tag; google brought up this article: https://www.seobility.net/en/wiki/Strong_and_Bold_Tags

So you could use strong for things you want to semantically emphasize and style it as bold in your css. In fiction my experience is that when people emphasize something said it's with italics.

So now I'm confused about the difference between the strong and em tags.

There really aren't any differences between <b>/<strong> and <i>/<em>. By default they are the same. But you can change all of them in CSS. For example, you can style <i> to be bold and <b> to be italic.

In that article, it states...

Difference between strong and bold

The difference between the two HTML tags is that bold makes text only visually look bold, while strong also semantically emphasizes the respective text as important and indicates that it is a meaningful word or text section.

This distinction is due to the fact that HTML code differentiates between semantic-logical and physical-visual HTML tags. While the former refer to the meaning (semantics = theory of meaning) of the respective areas, the latter merely define the optical display in browsers.

So when you are reading your eBook and you see text that is coded like <b>Some bold test.</b> and <strong>Some strong text.</strong>, they will both appear bold. There is 0 difference. Unless you've looked at the code, you won't know if the code is <b>, <strong>, or <span class="bold">. So this saying that <strong> emphasizes the text is rubbish. Your TTS is not going to differentiate. It's not going to say bold text any different then it would strong text. This is exactly the same for <i>, <em>, and <span class="italic">.