Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

[Victor Gaultney via Unicode]

I've been alerted to this thread by a friend, so just rejoined in order 
to respond. I'm currently doing research into italics.

Some of the confusion and disagreement about italics centers around 
whether it is typographic markup or textual content. Both historically 
and currently italics can be used for either, but can clearly change the 
meaning of a word or phrase*.  It also has a different semantic meaning 
than bold.** It is not just rich text, nor parallel to casing. It works 
differently, and most like the use of matching punctuation (parentheses, 
brackets, quotation marks).

Italics are sometimes used to indicate stress, although that is only one 
use. Stress is like a phonetic sound. It is represented in writing 
systems in different ways. However a writing system text encoding 
standard relates to the visual symbols and the rules of their behaviour 
rather than to the sound itself. Italicised text is visually different, 
and that difference can have a variety of meanings.

It would make sense for Unicode to encode the visual difference that 
marks those meanings (such as stress), just as it does with punctuation. 
Quotation marks, for example, are visually represented in different ways 
depending on the language, but Unicode does have characters that are use 
to indicate that 'this is a quote'. So it makes no sense for Unicode to 
encode 'stress' as a character, but it *may* make theoretical sense to 
encode 'italic begin' and 'italic end' characters, just as we do 
parentheses, brackets, quotation marks, etc. This would allow for the 
use of italic in non-styled environments (text messages, social media, 
etc.).

BTW - encoding the begin/end of italic would be very different from HTML 
semantic tags that attempt to encode meaning. Like punctuation, it only 
encodes the visual distinction, not the meaning.

Use of variation selectors, a single character modifier, or combining 
characters also seem to be less useful options, as they act at the 
individual character level and are highly impractical. They also violate 
the key concept that italics are a way of marking a span of text as 
'special' - not individual letters. Matched punctuation works the same 
way and is a good fit for italic.

Although italic is a deeply Latin script concept, people do want to 
apply it to non-latin text (with sometimes limited sense and success). 
Encoding two punctuation characters would allow use across scripts, in 
the same way that quotation marks are sometimes used.

My current research in italic won't get published publicly until 2020, 
however I gave a talk at ATypI Montreal about the nature of italic 
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vlFxed22Sg). I have an unpublished 
paper on italic but can't share it publicly (due to image rights). 
Contact me if you would like to see a private copy.

Victor Gaultney

* David Crystal's famous example is that these two sentences mean 
different things: 'I've lost my red slippers' and 'I've lost my /red/ 
slippers' (as opposed to my blue ones). Crystal, David. 1994. The 
Cambridge encyclopedia of language (Cambridge University Press), p13-14.

** Vachek, Josef, and Philip A Luelsdorff. 1989. Written language 
revisited (Amsterdam: Benjamins), p45-48.

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