Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[Adam Borowski]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 10:42:52AM -0800, Ken Whistler via Unicode wrote:
> On 12/11/2020 4:57 AM, Christian Kleineidam via Unicode wrote:
> > Create a new unicode character for begin/end italic formatting and
> > begin/end bold formatting that works like the unicode character for the
> > Right-to-Left switch.
> 
> <i>...</i> and <b>...</b>
> 
> Yeah, they are sequences of 3 (or 4) existing characters, and not single
> code points, but they accomplish what you are asking for and they work
> everywhere on the web already.
> 
> Nobody would thank you for introducing yet *another* form of scoped markup
> for the same effects that would take years to be picked up (inconsistently)
> in thousands of implementations, and which would introduce yet more
> possibilities for conflicts in dueling schemes for markup in text.

And, despite the original recommendation, enough people use math characters
for that, so even Google considers them equivalent to basic ASCII.

So just:
echo 'Homo sapiens'|tran italic
and 'ere you go.


喵!
-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Latin:   meow 4 characters, 4 columns,  4 bytes
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Greek:   μεου 4 characters, 4 columns,  8 bytes
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ Runes:   ᛗᛖᛟᚹ 4 characters, 4 columns, 12 bytes
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Chinese: 喵   1 character,  2 columns,  3 bytes <-- best!