title_body: Can I use bold and italics tags? I'm new to epubs; I'm wading through the InDesign tutorials and will then have to learn how to work with iBooks Author (and perhaps Sigil as well).
  
  Anyway, I ran into an unexpected snag in InDesign: It doesn't like bold and italics tags. As I understand it, they prefer to replace these tags with classes that select a particular font (e.g. Arial Bold or Arial Italic).
  
  Given that 1) ebooks are based on html, and 2) there must be 10 million websites that use bold and italics tags, this seems like a really stupid move to me.
  
  So here's my question: What would happen if I snubbed the new rules and published an epub with bold and italics tags? Would it create some technical problems that would come back to haunt me? Will Amazon or other publishers reject epubs that have traditional bold/italic tags?
  
  On a related note, I wonder if there's a way to instruct an epub to disallow fonts that don't "recognize" bold/italics tags. Fonts like Arial and Times New Roman would be allowed, while really funky fonts would be essentially banned (except perhaps in headings or art work).
upvoted_answer: I have never used Adobe Indesign, but I'm guessing that when they spit out html they use the italic and bold html tags. My guess is that in Adobe Indesign you are not seeing a separate font at all but a compound statement about font-style and font-family. 
  
  You can easily test this by outputting it epub/html and viewing the source.