Matthew Ernisse <matt at going-flying.com> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 11:15:54PM +0000, Johann Galle said unto me: > > I don't know if this has been pointed out before, but you can get > > rendering similar to man pages (which has things like bold and > > underline IIRC) by using troff; it should I think be fairly easy to > > parse, although I have not tried it myself. The beautiful thing of > > troff in this context is that there is also a designated MIME type > > text/troff [RFC4263]; they also have a https-site [TROFF]. > I think that it's reasonable to suggest that clients implement a form > of rich text other than text/gemini. I don't think we need to bloat > text/gemini to support every use case, instead I think we should > encourage a set of alternatives. The further discussion of this point has seemed to assume a need to implement all of troff (and then spun off into LaTeX). I'd like to propose an alternative: the tiniest subset of it. Specifically: .I "italic text" optional-suffix optional-prefix E.g., this contrived example with a poor use of parentheses: ---- "I think we should represent italics .I "somehow" !" she said. .I "After all, this is a medium designed for writing." ) ( ---- would yield (where *this* is italicized): ---- "I think we should represent italics *somehow*!" she said. (*After all, this is a medium designed for writing.*) ---- As with troff, .I would *not* add line breaks. Unlike troff, this should *only* have the line-based option, and not the option to make it apply to all further text until the next line beginning with ".R". That does make writing a whole italicized paragraph or page more cumbersome, but that's a pretty unusual use case. Incidentally, troff is a topic likely to interest those into gemini: it's a far more lightweight typesetting system than LaTeX, though it has its limitations, and like text/gemini it is very much line-based. It also follows the rule that (almost) any formatting command should be short and at the start of the line. Also, I do recognize that this idea is going to get shot down as paving the way for more extensibility, though we already have things like verbatim blocks and what have you (which are more esoteric than italic, so I don't buy the "we shouldn't support every use case" argument. It's far more common to emphasize words, to write titles of works, and so forth, than it is to do ASCII art (not that there's anything wrong with ASCII art; it's great) or present code blocks (the current demographics of the medium notwithstanding)). As to using CAPS LOCK as a substitute for italics, that is just not feasible for anything longer than a word or two. OBSERVE, AS YOU READ THIS PARAGRAPH, THAT IT IS LESS COMFORTABLE TO READ THAN ONE WRITTEN WITH STANDARD TYPOGRAPHY. EVEN THE ROMANS FINALLY GAVE IN AND INVENTED MINISCULE LETTERS FOR THEIR ALPHABET, AND THAT'S AFTER RESISTING FOR CENTURIES THE IDEA OF EVEN USING SPACES OR CLAUDIAN DOTS BETWEEN WORDS, SO LITTLE DID THEY CARE ABOUT READABILITY. Using *emphasis* is a pretty acceptable solution most of the time, I think, but it does fall apart a bit with longer passages or titles:
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