Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics

[Philip Linde]

On Mon, 9 Nov 2020 21:57:02 +0000
James Tomasino <tomasino at lavabit.com> wrote:

> Thunderbird has a nice collection of issues logged over the years related to text formatting in plain text messages. It is indeed quite tricky, but if a client wanted to implement it I'd suggest looking into the Thunderbird test suite as a starting point.

That seems like a very good starting point.

> Also on the subject of *this* being italic I do want to point out that that choice of formatting for the markup is uniquely Markdown oriented. Most other plain text systems interpret *this* as bold and /this/ as italic and _this_ as underlined. We have a lot of Markdown influence in gemtext, but authors coming from other domains may find some surprises in various clients.

The /italics/ style has the unfortunate side effect of producing false
positives for quite plausible Unix paths, e.g. /etc/. This has never
been a problem in the settings I use this style of implying typography
(mostly IRC) because the input isn't typically transformed and is
presented as written. For transformed text, I personally prefer a style
where the notion of emphasis is decoupled from the typographical choice
of how to represent it.

> If a client does choose to implement this as an optional add-on, please continue to show the characters when you style the text. In the case your parsing algorithm is incorrect the content will still be present and we can figure it out.

Another good suggestion. From my reading there is no question that such
an implementation would conform to the existing spec. As a more general
solution, a client could allow the user to specify formatting for
different sequences within the normal text lines using regular
expressions.

-- 
Philip
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