Hanging Indent in .md & maintaining formatting

[stockphrase]

I’m trying to make a hanging indent to publish MLA and Chicago-formatted bibliographic references on my Hugo site. In the .css, I’ve created a new selector to perform MLA-formatted indentation of references:

  .p2 {
    padding-left: 40px;
    text-indent: -40px;
    line-height: 2.5; 
}

If I put the following code in my markdown, I get the line spacing and indentation I want, but the asterisks used to create italics become literals, as if they are escaped.

So the code below produces…

<p class="p2"> Greely, Fred, Mary Jones, and Greg Attiks. *There's a Bat in My Barn: Struggles with the New Hampshire Brown Bat*. Wildlife Press, 2012.</p>

However, if I use a line separating the paragraph class and the content, I get the markdown styling but not the spacing.

So the code below produces . . .

<p class="p2"> 

Greely, Fred, Mary Jones, and Greg Attiks. *There's a Bat in My Barn: Struggles with the New Hampshire Brown Bat*. Wildlife Press, 2012.

</p>

[jmooring]

Markdown not being rendered within HTML block

Sorry to bump this thread out of the ground. To have markdown rendered within HTML blocks, what is usually done in other Markdown dialects is to add a markdown=1 option in the html outer tag. An other solution retained in Github Flavoured Markdown is to add blank lines this way: <div> *Emphasized* text. </div> This kind of behaviour is currently what I need to render a gallery. I am doing it this way: <div class="gallery" markdown=1>  ![Image 2](image_…

Solution: use a shortcode.

Template (/layouts/shortcodes/biblio-ref.html):

<p class="p2">
  {{ .Inner | .Page.RenderString }}
</p>

Markdown:

{{< biblio-ref >}}
Greely, Fred, Mary Jones, and Greg Attiks. *There's a Bat in My Barn: Struggles with the New Hampshire Brown Bat*. Wildlife Press, 2012.
{{< /biblio-ref >}}

Result:

[jmooring]

V2. Handles multiple references, one per line.

Shortcode:

{{- $p := .Page -}}
{{- range (split .Inner "\n") -}}
  {{- if gt (len .) 0 }}
  <p class="p2">
    {{ . | $p.RenderString }}
  </p>
  {{- end }}
{{- end -}}

Markdown:

{{< biblio-ref >}}
Hugo, Victor. *The Hunchback of Notre-Dame*. Unknown publisher, 1831.
Hugo, Victor. *Les Misérables*. Unknown publisher, 1862.
Hugo, Victor. *Les Travailleurs de la Mer*. Unknown publisher, 1866.
Hugo, Victor. *Quatre-vingt-treize*. Unknown publisher, 1874.
{{< /biblio-ref >}}

[stockphrase]

You are the master! I tip my hat sir.