bold, italic, underline at once

[Doug Ewell]

David Chmelik wrote:

> I know unicode does bold, italic, underline, but does it do them all
> at once?

It depends on the sense in which you mean that Unicode "does bold, italic, underline."

If you're talking about ISO/IEC 6429 ("ANSI") SGR escape sequences: in principle you should be able to combine bold ("1"), italic ("3"), and underline ("4"). In practice it depends on the capabilities of your terminal or console emulator. Note that this has nothing to do with Unicode.

If you're talking about Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer, or some other word-processing package: this is almost always supported. Note that this also has nothing to do with Unicode, or plain text at all.

If you're talking about a private-use mechanism, such as the HTML-like Plane 14 tags supported by Andrew West's BabelPad editor: it depends on the specific mechanism. Andrew's approach does support combining these, plus strikethrough, based on font attributes. Note that no mechanism of this sort is authorized by the Unicode Standard.

Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols do not include underlining, do not support combinations of bold and italic except as explicitly encoded, are limited to a very small set of base characters, and are not intended for plain text styling in any event.

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org