Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics

[John Cowan]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 3:41 PM Thomas M <thomas5max at gmail.com> wrote:


> Now, one way out of this problem is to use Unicode's support for italics
>

𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦, 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑑𝑜 𝑁𝑂𝑇 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒!

I don't know how that's going to look to you, but for me the word "really"
is just horribly badly kerned.  What is more, the ! is completely upright
because it has no math-italic equivalent.  I think the client needs to
decide whether to interpret ASCII inline markup of this kind.  The spec
says "Authors should not expect to exercise any control over the precise
rendering of their text lines, only of their actual textual content", but a
hint is not exercising precise control IMO.

Any client that does this must leave the asterisks (or slashes, or
whatever) in place, though; otherwise it has failed its basic duty of
displaying all the content, subject only to resource limitations.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his
own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and
among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.  --Edsger Dijkstra
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