Formatted inline. Emphasized text is traditionally presented in italics or boldface. A role attribute of bold or strong is often used to generate boldface, if italics is the default presentation.

An emphasis is often used wherever its typographic presentation is desired, even when other markup might theoretically be more appropriate.

These elements contain emphasis: biblioentry, bibliomixed, bibliomset, biblioset, bridgehead, citation, citetitle, emphasis (db.emphasis), entry, firstterm (db.firstterm), foreignphrase (db.foreignphrase), glosssee, glossseealso, glossterm (db.glossterm), line, link, literallayout, member, olink, orgdiv, para, phrase (db.phrase), primary, quote (db.quote), remark, secondary, see, seealso, simpara, subtitle, term, termdef, tertiary, title, titleabbrev.

The following elements occur in emphasis: text, abbrev, acronym, alt, anchor, author, biblioref, citation, citebiblioid, citetitle, coref, date, editor, email, emphasis (db._emphasis), emphasis (db.emphasis), firstterm (db._firstterm), firstterm (db.firstterm), footnote, footnoteref, foreignphrase (db._foreignphrase), foreignphrase (db.foreignphrase), glossterm (db._glossterm), glossterm (db.glossterm), indexterm (db.indexterm.endofrange), indexterm (db.indexterm.singular), indexterm (db.indexterm.startofrange), inlineequation, inlinemediaobject, jobtitle, link, literal, olink, optional, org, orgname, person, personname, phrase (db._phrase), phrase (db.phrase), productname, productnumber, quote (db._quote), quote (db.quote), remark, subscript, superscript, termdef, trademark, uri, wordasword, xref.