Rendering italics in an ASCII posting

By Anonymous on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 14:20

Forums

Dear Editor,

In a positing entitled "How to use source information given by Ancestry?" you mentioned an approach for rendering italics in programs like Ancestry or FamilySearch that restrict us to using ASCII characters only. I've unsuccessfully searched previous posts to see if I could find the answer to the following question.

Suppose a book title were My Crazy Family. Which of the following use of underscores would I utilize  in order to follow community convention?

_My_ _Crazy_ _Family_

_My Crazy Family_

_My_Crazy_Family_

 

Thanks for your guidance.

 

Submitted byEEon Wed, 01/13/2016 - 14:26

jsuplick, all that's needed is one underscore at the start and one at the end. Your middle example nails it.

Submitted byACProctoron Sat, 01/16/2016 - 04:50

I've had cause to use "ASCII mark-up" for representing a number of things in transcriptions, including italics, underline, inserted text, deletions, etc. There are several different conventions, but no standards that I'm aware of. The oriinal manuscript mark-up would have used symbols and forms not attainable in simple ASCII, and barely attainable in a rich-text document.

Interestingly, I recall that the software mark-up schemes for very early ASCII-based text were more logical. For instance:

*bold*

_underline_

/italic/

-strikethrough-

Often, the enclosing characters were paired-up to prevent ambiguity. However, that simplicity seems to have been lost, and schemes such as 'markdown' now use similar characters for entirely different effects.

Tony

Tony, yes, the convention you post above is one that's commonly used, although here in the U.S. we more-often see the _underscore_ used for italics. The rationale for that choice is two fold: (1) the slash or virgule / is used so often for a different purposes in grammatical construction; (2) the underscore has long been the means of signifying italics when using a system that does not allow italics—harking back to the era when typewriters could not create italics.

In the case at hand, of course, jsuplick's point of concern was where the start and stop points should be for the signifying mark.