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

[William_J_G Overington]

Hi

You might find the following links of interest. The proposal was not 
successful and was dismissed strongly, indeed using italics for 
emphasis.

For the avoidance of doubt I did not advocate regarding the encoding of 
the mathematical italic characters as a precedent for what I proposed.

It is somewhat ironic that the refusal uses italics for emphasis and 
could, in my opinion, be reasonably regarded as supporting evidence for 
the case of what you are wanting encoding, as that emphasis cannot at 
present be expressed in plain text. If it is not a semantic difference 
then it seems to me that there is no reason whatsoever to use italics at 
all in that refusal notice. So has Unicode Inc. in fact shown in its 
refusal the very need that it is refusing to encode?

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19063-italic-vs.pdf

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19195-italic-cmt.pdf

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7831

https://www.unicode.org/alloc/nonapprovals.html

However, such dismissals are not absolute because sometimes there is a 
U-turn later, for example with the encoding of emoji. Look at where 
emoji encoding is now, no longer about just backwards compatibility yet 
pushing forward with new designs. For the avoidance of doubt I am 
pleased that emoji are being encoded. I wish that they would not insist 
that my proposals for encoding a futuristic idea of mine are out of 
scope and refuse to allow them to be discussed in this mailing list or 
put to The Unicode Technical Committee.

I note that you mention a QID item.

There is an ongoing public review about encoding what are being called 
QID emoji.

https://www.unicode.org/review/pri408/

Although the page currently shows a closing date that has passed, the 
public review has, in fact, been reopened as listed on the following 
page.

https://www.unicode.org/review/

Best regards,

William Overington

Saturday 12 December 2020

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/

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