On Sun, Jan 20, 2019 at 2:57 PM James Kass via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> At which time it would only become a moot point for Twitter users. > There's also Facebook and other on-line groups. Plus scholars and > linguists. And interoperability. > How do you envision this working? In practice, English is still often limited to ASCII, because smart quotes and dashes aren't on the top-level of the keyboard, nor are accented characters. Adding italics to Unicode isn't going to change much if input tools don't support it, and keyboards aren't likely to change. Twitter and Facebook aren't going to change much if the apps and webpages don't provide a tool to mark italics. I don't see scholars and linguists demanding this. Scholars use markup languages that can annotate the details they need annotated, far more than just italics. Various dialects of SGML, XML and TeX do the job, not plain text. You've yet to demonstrate that interoperability is an actual problem. Modern operating systems have ways of copying rich text including italics around. Maybe it would have been better to have standardized rich text, either in Unicode or in a standard layer above Unicode, back in 1991. But that train has left; you're just going to complicate systems that currently handle and exchange rich text including italics. To expand on what Mark E. Shoulson said, to add new italics characters, you're going to need to not only copy all of Latin, but also Cyrillic (and reopen the whole Macedonian italics argument, where б, г, д, п, and т are all different in italics from in Russian). But also, Chinese is sometimes put in italics (cf. http://multilingualtypesetting.co.uk/blog/chinese-italics-oblique-fonts/ ) even if that horrifies many people. That page argues for, among other solutions, using what's effectively bold instead of italics. So we're talking about reencoding all of Chinese at least once (for emphasis) or twice (for italics and bold). That's a clear no-go.