Simple bold formatting in a line beginning is always treated as a list element

[Kojoley]

The examples in docs are clearly shows that there are some issues with bold formatting https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_69_0/doc/html/quickbook/syntax/phrase.html#quickbook.syntax.phrase.line_break

[danieljames]

An asterisk at the start of a line has been documented to have this behaviour since the beginning, see:

quickbook/doc/quickbook.qbk

Line 136 in 84c14dd

* A line starting with the star will be interpreted as an unordered list.

So I don't think it's a good idea to change it.

The examples broke because lists are now supported in table cells, they aren't in earlier versions of the language. But it was probably a mistake to interpret it as a list if there isn't a newline before the asterisk. For example:

[*bold*]
[
*list
]

The first table cell should probably contain bold text, not a list item. That would fix the examples.

[Kojoley]

An asterisk at the start of a line has been documented to have this behaviour since the beginning, see:

Actually I am not sure why it is so strict, and in:

*bold*
* list item, bla bla
  *bold*

bold is not bold

Consider markdown which is used on here, on GitHub (though, single asterisk here are italic):

bold

• list item, bla bla
  bold

[danieljames]

I don't know, it predated me. I generally tried not to change this kind of thing to ease the transition between language versions. I guess markdown only interprets an asterisk as a list if there's a space after it.

[Kojoley]

I guess markdown only interprets an asterisk as a list if there's a space after it.

Yes, and it is very intuitive.

[Kojoley]

Tried to upgrade Spirit docs from 1.5 to 1.7, the bold issue hit me here:

[tip  *For sequences only:* __x3__ exposes a set of API functions
      ...
]