Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

I've been alerted to this thread by a friend, so just rejoined in order
to respond. I'm currently doing research into italics.

Some of the confusion and disagreement about italics centers around
whether it is typographic markup or textual content. Both historically
and currently italics can be used for either, but can clearly change the
meaning of a word or phrase*.  It also has a different semantic meaning
than bold.** It is not just rich text, nor parallel to casing. It works
differently, and most like the use of matching punctuation (parentheses,
brackets, quotation marks).

Italics are sometimes used to indicate stress, although that is only one
use. Stress is like a phonetic sound. It is represented in writing
systems in different ways. However a writing system text encoding
standard relates to the visual symbols and the rules of their behaviour
rather than to the sound itself. Italicised text is visually different,
and that difference can have a variety of meanings.

It would make sense for Unicode to encode the visual difference that
marks those meanings (such as stress), just as it does with punctuation.
Quotation marks, for example, are visually represented in different ways
depending on the language, but Unicode does have characters that are use
to indicate that 'this is a quote'. So it makes no sense for Unicode to
encode 'stress' as a character, but it *may* make theoretical sense to
encode 'italic begin' and 'italic end' characters, just as we do
parentheses, brackets, quotation marks, etc. This would allow for the
use of italic in non-styled environments (text messages, social media,
etc.).

BTW - encoding the begin/end of italic would be very different from HTML
semantic tags that attempt to encode meaning. Like punctuation, it only
encodes the visual distinction, not the meaning.

Use of variation selectors, a single character modifier, or combining
characters also seem to be less useful options, as they act at the
individual character level and are highly impractical. They also violate
the key concept that italics are a way of marking a span of text as
'special' - not individual letters. Matched punctuation works the same
way and is a good fit for italic.

Although italic is a deeply Latin script concept, people do want to
apply it to non-latin text (with sometimes limited sense and success).
Encoding two punctuation characters would allow use across scripts, in
the same way that quotation marks are sometimes used.

My current research in italic won't get published publicly until 2020,
however I gave a talk at ATypI Montreal about the nature of italic
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vlFxed22Sg). I have an unpublished
paper on italic but can't share it publicly (due to image rights).
Contact me if you would like to see a private copy.

Victor Gaultney

* David Crystal's famous example is that these two sentences mean
different things: 'I've lost my red slippers' and 'I've lost my /red/
slippers' (as opposed to my blue ones). Crystal, David. 1994. The
Cambridge encyclopedia of language (Cambridge University Press), p13-14.

** Vachek, Josef, and Philip A Luelsdorff. 1989. Written language
revisited (Amsterdam: Benjamins), p45-48.
Received on Tue Jan 15 2019 - 08:39:00 CST