Re:Things Markdown got wrong
by adrusi on Saturday April 04, 2020 @02:33PM
(#22780367)
I really dislike /italic/. Relative to the slashes, the letters look like they're skewed in the wrong direction. Surely it should be \italic\. If unifying underlines and italics doesn't suit you.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Is this a localization thing? In this image here[0], the italicized word clearly leans to the right.
Funny thing happened when I tried to type that out: typing /italics/ caused libre office to automatically italicize the word.
When I read /italic/ or \italic\, I end up mentally transforming the text so that the slashes are vertical lines. When you do that with forward slashes, you get text with a negative slope (the wrong way).
Demonstration: https://codepen.io/adrusi/full/poJXRgy
Huh. That's pretty damned interesting. Thanks for explaining!
Same question, not sure what your parents meant at all. Unless there are languages italicised that leans to the left ( That would be very interesting )
I grew up on Usenet so I'm used to it.
Always thought the idea was that the first slash pushes the letters over, and the second one keeps them from falling down completely.
The unification of underline and italic is an artifact of the limited technology of the typewriter, and I see no reason to preserve that.