I normally italicize text like this: *text*. Technically, that's not exactly italic but it's emphasizing text, and the default is usually italics. I've been doing this a lot and it worked fine for PDF output using LaTeX. However, it doesn't work anymore. Wrapping text with * symbols doesn't italicize the text anymore, it underlines it instead. I don't know why it does that now all of a sudden. I can easily use \textit{text} but I prefer not to do that.