On 2019-01-11, James Kass via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote: > Exactly. William Overington has already posted a proof-of-concept here: > https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7831 > ... using a P.U.A. character /in lieu/ of a combining formatting or VS > character. The concept is straightforward and works properly with > existing technology.
It does not work with much existing technology. Interspersing extra codepoints into what is otherwise plain text breaks all the existing software that has not been, and never will be updated to deal with arbitrarily complex algorithms required to do Unicode searching. Somebody who need to search exotic East Asian text will know that they need software that understands VS, but a plain ordinary language user is unlikely to have any idea that VS exist, or that their searches will mysteriously fail if they use this snazzy new pseudo-plain-text italicization technique It's also fundamentally misguided. When I _italicize_ a word, I am writing a word composed of (plain old) letters, and then styling the word; I am not composing a new and different word ("_italicize_") that is distinct from the old word ("italicize") by virtue of being made up of different letters. I think the VS or combining format character approach *would* have been a better way to deal with the mess of mathematical alphabets, because for mathematicians, *b* is a distinct symbol from b, and while there may be correlated use of alphabets, there need be no connection whatever between something notated b and something notated *b*. But for plain text, it's crazy. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.