Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics

[Thomas M]

Hi all,

I'm very impressed with this project. I'm using the Lagrange client by
Jaakko Keränen and it's very beautiful. But I noticed an oversight.

Lagrange handles images absolutely great: they're only downloaded when I
click on them. And I can (barely) live without inline links. But italics
are just too important for writing in the Latin script (note that I
don't really care about bold face). Other writing systems may have their
own way of conveying emphasis, but for the Latin script it's italics.

The Gemini FAQ [1] itself already shows the issue: the heading for
section 2.3 needed italics, but none were available, so it uses
asterisks for emphasis. This does not look good in the otherwise very
slick Lagrange.

I don't think the ability to mark emphasis is likely to lead to abuse.
Also, even if you plan on primarily interacting with Gemini in your
terminal, let me point out that a lot of terminals support italics
nowadays. And if your terminal doesn't, it can just ignore it.

Now, one way out of this problem is to use Unicode's support for italics
[2]. You could maybe argue that it should be the job of the text
encoding to encode emphasis and not the job of the markup. But I don't
have the impression that this is particularly well encoded in Unicode.
And I think, for example, Cyrillic is missing from it.

So, I hope you'll consider adding markup for emphasis, even if it will
complicate the client implementation.

One option is maybe to just make rendering emphasis *optional*. The
specification could say that surrounding asterisks (*like this*) denote
emphasis, but if a client doesn't want to render it, they could just
display the asterisks.

Cheers,
Thomas

[1]: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols