You might check out my scimax-editmarks package. You can create bracket
syntax like that which can be fontified, e.g. made smaller, lighter, etc.
to de-emphasize. It is not org-syntax, and uses a pre-processing step on
export, but if all you want is visual syntax in org-mode, something like
this might be what you are looking for. The details are in this video
description, and you can see what it looks like and does here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBmvBkpzixs

John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin (he/him/his)
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu



On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 2:16 PM fatiparty--- via General discussions about
Org-mode. <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org> wrote:

>
> Jan 14, 2022, 06:50 by maciaschain@posteo.net:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > fatiparty--- via "General discussions about Org-mode." writes:
> >
> >> Is there anything to perform the opposite, playing down the text?
> >>
> >
> > Are you referring to nested emphasis, something like in LaTeX
> >
> > \emph{foo \emph{bar} baz}
> >
> > = foo...baz in italic; bar in normal font?
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Juan Manuel
> >
>
> I am referring to an org file.  Suppose I have a file doc.org
>
> cat doc.org
>
> a  celebration that started in the 4th Century [IV] in the Southern Levant
>  [ _a geographical region that corresponds to present-day Israel and
> Palestine_ ].
>
> org-mode in emacs will emphasize by underlining geographical detail.  I
> would like
> to have a way to play down the text rather than emphasizing the text.  It
> would be
> beneficial to have other bracketing characters for doing the opposite of
> emphasizing.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>