“plain text styling”…

[Cristian Secară]

În data de Thu, 5 Jan 2023 01:53:40 +0100, Kent Karlsson via Unicode a scris:

> More or less regularly there are (informal) requests on this list for
> encoding (new) control codes or control code sequences for text
> styling (like bold, italics, text colour, …) also for ”plain text”.

This seems to overlooks that a "plain text" subjected to such torment can no longer be called "plain".

Or, how do you differentiate this plain text from the other plain text ?
"I am sending this e-mail in strict plain text"
"I am sending this e-mail in a somewhat plain text"
"I am sending this e-mail in a complicated plain text"
"I am sending this e-mail in a code-controlled plain text"

Also in places where the number of characters matters (and supposing the editor knows how to interpret, and therefore, hide the control characters), like a SMS text message sent over a GSM network [1], one may become confused about the strange increase (or decrease, if a limit is imposed) of the characters count.

> This instead of using such things RTF, SGML, HTML, ODF, etc. In the
> latter, the style (and other) controls are given as strings of
> printable characters (like <b>, </b>), not involving control
> characters.

Not sure I understand, especially that you later mentioned ECMA-48.

>From a simple (basic) text editor perspective that knows nothing about styling, what is the difference between displaying these two examples related to same intended result ?
<b>bold</b>
versus
\x1b[1mbold\x1b[2m

Same question if the ~simple text editor *knows* about both of the above styling methods ?

Or perhaps from the user perspective ?

Cristi

[1] https://www.secarica.ro/index.php/eue/sms-story/the-sms-discrimination

-- 
Cristian Secară
https://www.secarica.ro