How can I get iOS to stop changing asterisks (*) to capital "I"s? I do a lot of writing on iOS: mostly email (in Outlook for iOS) and plaintext drafts (in Ulysses) using an iPad Pro with a keyboard. My writing style happens to include:


Lots of bulleted lists
Seriously, like way too many
Sometimes even when they may not totally be needed


Here's the problem:

Sometimes, when I type:

* Blahblahblah 

...it changes to:

I Blahblahblah

What I've determined - this problem occurs:


Inconsistently - I can repro it regularly, but not all the time
After some (variable) amount of additional keystrokes happen - the text appears as typed (an asterisk) at first, then sometimes changes after I add more chars later - sometimes one later, sometimes a bunch later, sometimes not at all.


Putting it together, I'm thinking it's caused by some form of autocorrect in the OS.


Can anyone confirm if that sounds like the culprit, or how to determine if it is?
If so, how can I teach autocorrect that I like bullets (and markdown), thank you very much, without just turning AC off entirely, robbing my loved ones of a regular source of humor?
You can set iOS to not autocorrect something by adding it as an autocorrect shortcut. This also lets you see if autocorrect is to blame without disabling it.

Unfortunately, iOS doesn't let you set text replacements of less than 2 characters. OS X is supposed to not either, but you still can, and iCloud will sync the settings over.


Go to System Preferences → Keyboard → Text and click the + in the lower left.
For both the ‘Replace’ and ‘With’, type an asterisk.
Wait for iCloud to sync the settings over to your iOS device. Your new text replacement should show in Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement.


If the asterisk still changes, there's likely something else going on here, and I would suggest disabling autocorrect entirely just for testing purposes to establish if it is the root cause of the problem.