(sorry for multiple responses...)
On 1/13/19 10:00 PM, Martin J. Dürst via Unicode wrote:
On 2019/01/14 01:46, Julian Bradfield via Unicode wrote:
On 2019-01-12, Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
On Sat, 12 Jan 2019 10:57:26 +0000 (GMT)
And what happens when you capitalise a word for emphasis or to begin a
sentence? Is it no longer the same word?
Indeed. As has been observed up-thread, the casing idea is a dumb one!
We are, however, stuck with it because of legacy encoding transported
into Unicode. We aren't stuck with encoding fonts into Unicode.
No, the casing idea isn't actually a dumb one. As Asmus has shown, one
of the best ways to understand what Unicode does with respect to text
variants is that style works on spans of characters (words,...), and is
rich text, but thinks that work on single characters are handled in
plain text. Upper-case is definitely for most part a single-character
phenomenon (the recent Georgian MTAVRULI additions being the exception).
Not just an exception, but an exception that proves the rule. It's
precisely because plain-text distinctions, generally speaking, should be
at the letter level as Asmus says that there was so much shouting about
MTAVRULI. That these are exceptional demonstrates the existence of the
rule.
But even most adults won't know the rules for what to italicize that
have been brought up in this thread. Even if they have read books that
use italic and bold in ways that have been brought up in this thread,
most readers won't be able to tell you what the rules are. That's left
to copy editors and similar specialist jobs.
I don't think there's really a case to be made that italics are or
should work the same as capitals, or that they are justified for the
same reasons that capitals are justified. And the use-cases show how
people are using them: not necessarily for Chicago Manual of Style
mandated purposes, but for emphasis of varying kinds.
There was a time when computers (and printers in particular) were
single-case. There was some discussion about having to abolish case
distinctions to adapt to computers, but fortunately, that wasn't necessary.
Abolishing case I could see as a hassle, and we have become somewhat
dependent on it for other things. But it was a bad idea to start with.
~mark
