Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics

On 11/9/20 9:20 PM, Philip Linde wrote:
> Rendering something like
> *this* as italic text may also be surprisingly error prone, considering
> other contexts in which one might want to use "*" and the different
> sequences of text one might want to emphasize. It's something Markdown
> parsers frequently get wrong, or at the very least causes unintuitive
> problems.

Thunderbird has a nice collection of issues logged over the years related 
to text formatting in plain text messages. It is indeed quite tricky, but 
if a client wanted to implement it I'd suggest looking into the 
Thunderbird test suite as a starting point.

Also on the subject of *this* being italic I do want to point out that 
that choice of formatting for the markup is uniquely Markdown oriented. 
Most other plain text systems interpret *this* as bold and /this/ as 
italic and _this_ as underlined. We have a lot of Markdown influence in 
gemtext, but authors coming from other domains may find some surprises in 
various clients.

If a client does choose to implement this as an optional add-on, please 
continue to show the characters when you style the text. In the case your 
parsing algorithm is incorrect the content will still be present and we 
can figure it out.

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