Benjamin Smedberg wrote: >Just a quick disctinction: _underscores_ generally mean italic, for titles >and citations. *Asterisks* mean bold emphasis. This convention originally >developed from author's typescript markup.
Another convention from editor's markups is that bold is used for emphasis when the purpose is to draw attention to the line in the context of the entire page, whereas italic is used for emphasis in the context of the sentence alone. If you've got a page of text including the sentence "That may be what you meant, but it's not what you *said*", the last word should be italic, not bold, because you don't want the word "said" to jump out at anyone who happens to be skimming through quickly. On the other hand, if you've got something like "*Warning*: If you don't follow these directions it might crash your system", then you do want bold and not italic. My observation on the Usenet and in email has been that most people use asterisks for both kinds of emphasis, regardless of whether they would be bold or italic. For non-emphatic italics (titles, etc.), I will often use /slashes/. If I'm emailing copy for typeset, I will do that consistently (with an explanatory note attached). In ordinary correspondence and Usenet discussions, I sometimes do and sometimes don't. I tend to follow the style of whomever I'm responding to. I suspect that differing opinions on use of all-caps in email is related to the fact that email texts appear differently on different systems. The guy who writes them probably thinks that it's easy to read and lends emphasis to his words, but for readers using a different display font it is difficult to read and just looks ugly. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
