Encoding italic

[Tex via Unicode]

David,

"italics has never been considered part of plain text and has always been considered outside of plain text. "

Time to change the definition if that is what is holding you back. As has been said before, interlinear annotation, emoji and other features of Unicode which  are now considered plain text were not in the original definition. If Unicode encoded an italic mechanism it would be part of plain text, just as the many other styled spaces, dashes and other characters have become plain text despite being typographic.

"The fact that italics can be handled elsewhere very much weighs against the value of your change. Everything you want to do can be done and is being done, except when someone chooses not to do it."

I heard a recent similar argument that goes: walls have been around since medieval times and they work really well... (Except they provably don't.)

As with the many problems with walls not being effective, you choose to ignore the legitimate issues pointed out on the list with the lack of italic standardization for Chinese braille, text to voice readers, etc.
The choice of plain text isn't always voluntary. And the existing alternatives, like math italic characters, are problematic.

tex






-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of David Starner via Unicode
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2019 11:59 PM
To: Unicode Mailing List
Subject: Re: Encoding italic

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 11:37 PM James Kass via Unicode
<unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> As Tex Texin observed, differences of opinion as to where we draw the
> line between text and mark-up are somewhat ideological.  If a compelling
> case for handling italics at the plain-text level can be made, then the
> fact that italics can already be handled elsewhere doesn’t matter.  If a
> compelling case cannot be made, there are always alternatives.

To the extent I'd have ideology here, it's that that line is arbitrary
and needs to fit practical demands. Should we have eight-bit bytes?
I'm not sure that was the best solution, and other systems worked just
fine, but we've got a computing environment that makes anything else
unpractical. Unlike that question, italics has never been considered
part of plain text and has always been considered outside of plain
text. The fact that italics can be handled elsewhere very much weighs
against the value of your change. Everything you want to do can be
done and is being done, except when someone chooses not to do it.

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.