Re: OT: Gmail (was Re: Conlang Flag art links)

Sai Emrys wrote:
> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:46 PM, Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
> wrote:
>
>> (There's a lot of people who use bold when they should be using italics,
>> but the fact that *asterisks* are pretty much unnoticeable until you're
>> directly looking at them, just like italic text, and the fact that
>> CAPITAL LETTERS stand out from the surrounding text, just like bold,
>> mean that the asterisk = italic, caps = bold is the only logical behavior.)
>
>
> Bold, to me, does not especially stand out from text except when directly
> looked at (nor does underscore). Italics do, caps do.
In print even? I can kinda believe it on screen --- Microsoft's font
renderer with Times particularly seems to make the italics font quite a
lot lighter so it stands out, but in print, the very reason bold is used
for keywords and headings, but italics is used for foreign words and
emphasis, is precisely so they don't stand out.

> For me the natural equivalents (motivated just orthographically, I guess)
> are _underscore_, /italics/, *bold*, and MY CAPS LOCK IS ON SO I'M SHOUTING
> LIKE AN IDIOT.
Which in the last case is pretty much how bold-for-emphasis looks to me
too ;) But no. All caps does have plentiful uses. For instance:

   PHONOLOGY

   The phonology of Ancient Foietisc was relatively normal for an old
   Germanic language, ...

The all caps there was most desirable; although it wouldn't
*necessarily* correspond to bold text in print, it could, but the word
"necessarily" in this paragraph most definitely could not.

As for slashes, if I'd written /necessarily/, I would've read it
something along the lines of "nechessurreeloo".

--
Tristan.