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

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
wrote:

> When you *view* an email with an asterisked word, does it show up as bold
> (and not show the asterisks at all)?
>
No, that showed as asterisks.

I think it just treats bold as rich-text copy, and hides the asterisks from
me per standard markup, but that they result as *s when sent through a
plaintext filter like the listserv.

I agree that it's a misfeature in this case at least, but in the general
case of pasting in bold text to a plaintext email, I think it may actually
be the correct behavior.

FWIW I can easily frob it to go into plain text mode, but I just don't
usually bother to. (Though I very rarely, if ever, use markup in emails; I'm
used to treating them as essentially plain text formats. Perhaps this is
just my own fault then? :-P)

Also FWIW, I use asterisks and bold differently, in situations (such as ZBB
or my LJ blog) where I have the option to use either - asterisks are not the
same kind of emphasis as italic, bold, or underscore. They're semi
equivalent to a strong verbal stress, whereas bold is equivalent to a
??moderate one. Italics, caps, and underscore I use almost exclusively for
syntactic / formatting reasons (titles, loanwords, book names, headings,
etc). But again, I don't think that's a very lucid explanation of how I use
'em differentially; I just know that I *do*... ;-)

- Sai