Coloured text in message _ = " " boxes

[Simons Mith]

I'm getting tantalisingly close to finishing my first pass through all the dialogue text in the Wesnoth game. One thing I have noticed in that in some scenarios the writers have had to jump through a hoops to differentiate between spoken text, written text, the narrator narrating, the text on signs, and the text on Portentuous Obelisks of Major Import. It seems it's hard to do this elegantly at the moment, and the things people have tried are a bit hit-and-miss.

Has there been any consideration of permitting bold/italic/coloured text and possibly different typefaces in Wesnoth scenario dialogue boxes? I haven't found it as a feature request. If these are already possible, I see several places where I'd apply them before uploading all these text files I've been working on for people to look at. Looking at the Wesnoth tutorials, I see link references and italic text already in use. But that's in Help WML, which doesn't seem to be the same as Scenario WML.

[scott]

You can get bold by starting with a *. A second * in the same string sometimes turns it off.

@ gives you green and # gives you red, of course, but some people may not realize they work in normal message strings.

Some tricks can be played by using the caption tag. For example,
[message]
speaker=narrator
caption= _ "Inscription on the Obelisk:"
message= _ "#Rub me three times"
[/message]

makes the caption line boldface like the speaker's name and lets you have another formatting option.

EDIT: I have no idea if this is documented anywhere.