Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

[David Starner via Unicode]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2019 at 2:57 PM James Kass via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
wrote:

> At which time it would only become a moot point for Twitter users.
> There's also Facebook and other on-line groups.  Plus scholars and
> linguists.  And interoperability.
>

How do you envision this working? In practice, English is still often
limited to ASCII, because smart quotes and dashes aren't on the top-level
of the keyboard, nor are accented characters. Adding italics to Unicode
isn't going to change much if input tools don't support it, and keyboards
aren't likely to change. Twitter and Facebook aren't going to change much
if the apps and webpages don't provide a tool to mark italics.

I don't see scholars and linguists demanding this. Scholars use markup
languages that can annotate the details they need annotated, far more than
just italics. Various dialects of SGML, XML and TeX do the job, not plain
text.

You've yet to demonstrate that interoperability is an actual problem.
Modern operating systems have ways of copying rich text including italics
around.  Maybe it would have been better to have standardized rich text,
either in Unicode or in a standard layer above Unicode, back in 1991. But
that train has left; you're just going to complicate systems that currently
handle and exchange rich text including italics.

To expand on what Mark E. Shoulson said, to add new italics characters,
you're going to need to not only copy all of Latin, but also Cyrillic (and
reopen the whole Macedonian italics argument, where б, г, д, п, and т are
all different in italics from in Russian). But also, Chinese is sometimes
put in italics (cf.
http://multilingualtypesetting.co.uk/blog/chinese-italics-oblique-fonts/ )
even if that horrifies many people. That page argues for, among other
solutions, using what's effectively bold instead of italics. So we're
talking about reencoding all of Chinese at least once (for emphasis) or
twice (for italics and bold). That's a clear no-go.
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