On 02/19/2018 04:43 PM, Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan wrote:
On 02/19/2018 10:44 AM, F M Salter wrote:
To explain in more detail. LyX uses utf-8. utf-8 is
standard on
most operating systems.
RTF is obsolescent and is not a text file.
If I insert utf-8 italic characters into a LyX file, the plain
text
output contains italic characters.
I wanted to know if there was a LyX method which would produce
italic utf-8 characters from emphasised text.
If not, this would become a feature request.
You are confusing characters with glyphs. The letter ‘a’ may be drawn
many ways, but it is always the same character no matter how it is
drawn; the distinct ways of drawing it are glyphs.
Unicode is supposed to distinguish characters from glyphs. Its
designers have done this imperfectly, sometimes making inexcusable
mistakes, but they still basically do this.
There are no italics characters as such. There are characters whose
typical glyphs might seem to be italic, but these characters are not
their glyphs, nor are the character with such typical glyphs the same
characters as you take for the non-italicized versions. There is no
distinct _character_ italicized ‘a’, though there are distinct
characters that are not ‘a’ but may look like italicized ‘a’ to you. A
font file that rendered them without italicization would not violate
the standards.
In theory, Unicode could have a combing character, such that following
a character with the combining character would signal that the first
character were in some way to be emphasized. Right now, Unicode does
not have this, and I doubt that it ever will, because of the struggles
that would result over how many such characters there should be to
support distinct forms of emphasis.
Now, you might suggest that LyX _fake_ it, identifying characters from
one range that typically _look_ like italicizations of the characters
found in standard European alphabets. I'm not sure how well it could
be implemented. But, in any case, I don't think that this suggestion
would be well received. And, if you make it, then you need to be
_very_ clear about what would provoke this device. (All emphasis?
textit?)
I probably should add this point: If you have an interface that is
indeed italicizing characters on demand, then it is using something
other that Unicode as such to do it; any editor that italicizes some
substrings and not others is actually using mark-up of some sort in
its files.
