Plain text (from Re: Avoidance variants)

[Ilya Zakharevich]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 01:00:09PM +0000, William_J_G Overington wrote:
> >> Exact semantics of formatting characters aside, it is best to define plain text as a stateless stream. The characters you're proposing require a decoder to keep state, therefore they won't do. <TIC>At most you may ask for

> *U+E1001 COMBINING ITALICIZER
> *U+E1003 COMBINING BOLDIFIER
> after all, we already have U+0332 COMBINING LOW LINE and U+0336 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY for <u> and <s> resp, thus adding their counterparts for <i> and <b> will merely complete the set. </TIC>

> > COMBINING EMBOLDENER, surely. ;-) 

> So, if that were implemented, then to typeset, say, the word astrolabe within a plain text file, in italics, one would need to use nine instances of the COMBINING ITALICIZER, one instance after each letter of the word astrolabe.
> That would be fine and the characters discussed would be, in my opinion, two useful additions to Unicode.
> If a two word phrase were to be typeset within a plain text file then each letter of the two words would need to have an instance of the COMBINING ITALICIZER after each letter of the word. Would one add an instance after the space character that is between the words?

> 27 March 2015

Guys, it is just a 4 days wait.  Then we can discuss the last question
in depth until a consensus is reached!

Ilya