Encoding italic

[James Kass via Unicode]

David Starner wrote,

 > You're emailing from Gmail, which has support for italics in email.

But I compose e-mails in BabelPad, which has support for far more than 
italics in HTML mail.  And I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird to send and 
receive text e-mail via the Gmail account.

And if I wanted to /display/ italics in a web page, I would create the 
source file in a plain-text editor.  (HTML mark-up is fairly easy to 
type with the ASCII keyboard.)

If I compose a text file in BabelPad, it can be opened in many rich-text 
applications and the information survives intact.  Unless I am foolish 
enough to edit the file in the rich-text application and file-save it.  
Because that mungs the plain-text file, and it can no longer be 
retrieved by the plain-text editor which created it.

 >> ...third-party...
 >
 > Where are these tools?

BabelPad is an outstanding example.  Earlier in this discussion a web 
search found at least a handful of third-party tools devoted to 
liberating the math-alphas for Twitter users.

 > The superscripts show a problem with multiple encoding; even if you
 > think they should be Unicode superscripts, and they look like Unicode
 > superscripts, they might be HTML superscripts. Same thing would happen
 > with italics if they were encoded in Unicode.

Hmmm.  Rich-text styled italics might be copied into other rich-text 
applications, but they cannot be copied into plain-text apps.  If 
Unicode-enabled italics existed, plain-text italics could be copy/pasted 
into either rich-text or plain-text applications and survive intact.  So 
Unicode-enabled italics would be interoperable. Anyone concerned about 
interoperability would be well advised to go with plain-text.  I am, so 
I do.  When I can.

Kie eksistas fumo, tie eksistas fajro.