You need to go a bit farther back in history to sort this out. The convention to underline text was introduced on typewriters to indicate italic text - typewriters of course generally did not have an italic font easily available. Other conventions adopted to overcome the limitations of typewriters include more extensive use of single and double quote marks. Underscores were rarely used before the introduction of the typewriter. (In fact, I cannot recall where they would be used in typeset printing.) -- Eric Hildum
> > On 30/6/02 1:09 am, "Dan Frakes" wrote: > >> on 6/29/02 9:32 AM, Paul van den Hooven at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>> Just a simple question. In the quoted text I see “_not_” and >>> “_without_”. Can someone tell me why there are these underscores? >> >> Since the message was in plain text, it's not possible to >> underline/bold/italicize. It's generally accepted that when typing in plain >> text, the underscore before and after a word like _this_ is read as that >> word being underlined, while asterisks before and after like *this* is read >> as bold or italics (basically, emphasis). > > I always understood the convention was _underscore_, /italic/, *bold*, but > MS Word's Autocorrect converts _this_ to italic and *this* to bold and does > nothing at all with /this/. I guess we all have our own different > conventions <g> > -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
