Hi all, This may be useful for newbies. A macro based on the "Insert Tag" macro which comes with jEdit, but which surrounds the selected text with b and /b tags. I bound it to Ctrl-B and it's a very useful way to quickly make a word bold.

void insertTag(tag)
{
	caret = textArea.getCaretPosition();
	if( tag == null || tag.length() == 0) return;
	text = textArea.getSelectedText();
	if(text == null) text = "";
	sb = new StringBuffer();
	sb.append("<").append(tag).append(">");
	sb.append(text);
	sb.append("");
	textArea.setSelectedText(sb.toString());
	//if no selected text, put the caret between the tags
	if(text.length() == 0)
		textArea.setCaretPosition(caret + tag.length() + 2);
}

if(buffer.isReadOnly())
	Macros.error(view, "Buffer is read-only.");
else
	insertTag("b");

Enjoy