Moved to Chat for topic drift: At 12:49 AM 11/28/05 -0500, Tamara P Duvall wrote:
>In the old PC language, stars signify italics, and it's _xyz_ which >signify underlines, so I've been PC un-PC until y'all called me on it. >But the PC PC underline is both harder to achieve and less visible, so >I'd as soon return to the old - PC-wise un-PC - version... Current usage seems to be to use asterisks for *emphasis* -- because, as you note, they are more visible than underscores, and because they have a history of being used for emphasis in print media -- _*H*Y*M*A*N* *K*A*P*L*A*N*_, for example -- and to use underscores when _underlines_ are specifically wanted, which allows a useful distinction between emphasis and, for example, the titles of books. A word which is starred in ASCII would be underlined in handwriting or typescript, but would be set in italics if printed, so using italic codes to indicate underlining doesn't strike me as any more reprehensible than using underlining to indicate italics, which is the convention in typescript. I don't know what the manuscript protocol is if you really do want the passage underlined. There are special underlines to indicate ~boldface~ and =small caps=, but my abbreviated list of proofreaders' marks doesn't say anything about underline. I don't, just offhand, recall ever seeing an underlined passage in a printed book -- maybe you *can't* indicate underlining in a manuscript. (There is also an ASCII code for strike-through: put a string of ^Hs after the word to be stricken. This is a remnant of an early system in which control-H was a backspace.) The only difficulty with using stars as emphasis is that it leads to confusion when stars are also used as asterisks. I try to use "[1]" instead of "*" -- which works, really, only when you also have a "[2]". Sometimes I remove the breathless emphasis when I add a footnote. Speaking of footnotes -- there's an interesting convention on the SF hierarchy of Usenet of using a star in square brackets ([*]) as an abbreviation for "I did not understand that remark; please provide the footnote." OB off-color: I used to know a bit of doggerel that ended: "Wasn't Mary a perfect fool, her little *." -- Joy Beeson http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where it's wet and cold To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
