bold, italic, underline at once

[William_J_G Overington]

David Chmelik wrote as follows.

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

As explained by other posts in this thread that is not actually 
available in Unicode plain text at present.

However, it could be.

Some time ago I put forward a suggestion for using Variation Selector 14 
to signal Italic for a character in plain text.

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

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

However my proposed enhancement to Unicode was rejected, indeed rejected 
at a formal decision not to encode level.

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

However, I consider the way that that ruling is expressed is 
unfortunate, as it has "explicitly not" about something that I did not 
suggest.

And it uses "inherently" which is only because the people there years 
ago decided that.

Another issue is that they  will not encode characters for a span of 
characters to be all italic because that is stateful, yet when a way to 
achieve the effect in plain text without being stateful is suggested 
they won't do that either.

My suggestion could be extended to use Variation Selector 13 to signal 
Bold. I am unsure if Variation Selectors could be cascaded for Bold 
Italic or whether a single Variation Selector specifically for Bold 
Italic would be needed.

But it is all Unicode politics.

William Overington

Monday 29 August 2022