Ecma-48 proposed styling controls update updated & math expression representation proposal update

[Eli Zaretskii]

> CC: "unicode at corp.unicode.org" <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2024 17:35:37 +0000
> From: Doug Ewell via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
> 
> Marius Spix wrote:
> 
> > Question: How do you copy text preserving the styling?
> > For example, you have the following text (in these examples I use ^ as
> > escape character and visible characters instead of the proposed
> > tagging characters.)
> >
> > This is a ^[31mred Text^[0m ECMA-48 styling.
> >
> > You now want to copy the word "text" and insert it to another
> > document. The styling information gets lost.
> > Then you copy the words "a ^[31mtext" and your whole document after
> > these words becomes red until the text color is changed again. This is
> > very confusing and unintuitive.
> 
> How is this handled in Word, or in any other WYSIWYG editor?

They use specialized formats of the clipboard data, where the styles
and typefaces are preserved.  See

  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dataxchg/clipboard-formats

> What about in WordPerfect for DOS, where different foreground and background colors in text mode represented bold, italics, underlining, etc.?

You mean, copying from some part of WordPerfect document to another
part of the same document?  Because DOS supported only one program at
at ime, and didn't have a clipboard (or anything similar) at all.

> Did we not have any way to manipulate styled text before HTML came along?

Yes, of course.  RichText comes to mind.