[oconnor0]

The Sile PDF says

> There is no shortcut for boldface, because boldface isn’t good typographic practice and so we don’t want to make it easy for you to make bad books.

Where/what is that from? Like is that common "knowledge"?

[kuschku]

Not really. Generally, ALL CAPS and italic are preferred over bold (as both are specially cut for that, and keep the contrast roughly the same), but bold is not bad either (and for sans serif, always choose bold over italic). Compare with: http://practicaltypography.com/bold-or-italic.html

What you definitely shouldn’t do is underlining, though: http://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html

[dmitrygr]

Both of your links redirect to: http://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html, which lacks useful content

[eridius]

Maybe that's a random redirect? Both of the original links work just fine for me.

[vbernat]

You need to copy/paste the links to avoid to send a Referrer header.

[fish_fan]

I am not quite sure about it not being good typographic practice, but it's sure weird historically to mix faces of different weights. Furthermore there is already emphasized (italic) text; it's not strictly necessary for prose.

I've read a handful of books where there is some type of bold formatting used, and in each case it was electronic rich text (e.g an email or word document).