Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics

[Philip Linde]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020 11:04:37 -0500
Matthew Ernisse <matt at going-flying.com> wrote:

> I think that it's reasonable to suggest that clients implement a form of
> rich text other than text/gemini.  I don't think we need to bloat text/gemini
> to support every use case, instead I think we should encourage a set of
> alternatives.

Does the client itself really need to do this? Allow the configuration
of MIME type handlers that delegate the task to other applications and
it's no longer strictly necessary, but would the user experience suffer?

> Reviewing the Wikipedia list of document markup languages[1] I'd lean towards
> TROFF or LaTeX.  They are both mature and reasonably well defined formats.
> LaTeX has the advantage of being a target for several document preprocessors
> (eg: pandoc[2]) so it need not be authored in directly.

Those formats would both be a hard no for me. If the goal of Gemini is
to be a protocol that makes the implementation of a client and server
simple, I don't think that recommending the inclusion of full
typesetting systems is reasonable. A full distribution of LaTeX in
particular can easily eat hundreds of megabytes, even gigabytes.

-- 
Philip
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