On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 7:41 PM James Kass via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> Computer text tradition aside, nobody seems to offer any legitimate > reason why such information isn't worthy of being preservable in > plain-text. Perhaps there isn't one. > Worthy of being preservable? Again, if you want rich text, you know where to find it. Maybe italics could have been encoded in plain text, even as late as 1991. But more than a quarter century on, everything supports italics with a few rare exceptions. You're changing everything at a very low level for a handful of systems. On the other hand, tradition matters. Again, at the bottom of this email I'm drafting is "*B* *I* *U* | *A*▼ tT▼|▼"; that is, bold, italics, underline, text color, text size, and extra options, like font choice and lists. Even non-computer geeks are familiar with that distinction. What's the advantage of moving one feature into Unicode and breaking the symmetry? On the other hand, most people won't enter anything into a tweet they can't enter from their keyboard, and if they had to, would resort to cut and paste. The only people Unicode italics could help without change are people who already can use mathematical italics. If you don't have buy-in from systems makers, people will continue to lack practical access to italics in plain text systems.
