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E m p h a s i s

Inspired by a comment by `kensanata` in #gemini@tilde.chat, I want to try to use Sperrsatz/spärrning for emphasis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_(typography)#Letter-spacing (https://en.wikipedia.org)

I raised the issue of words being split in the middle, but there’s a plethora of unicode spaces, and U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE seems to be the best suited for this.

So now we can really e m p h a s i z e words again!

Update 2022-02-05

Re-reading the IRC conversation, I’ve realized that this entire thing was mine, `kensanata` is blameless!

Idiomdrottning very kindly calls this a “proposal” which gives me way too much credit. She also warns that it won’t always be handled well by screenreaders.

Against Faux Sperrsatz Emphasis (idiomdrottning.org)

(As an aside, there’s nothing “faux” about this. From what I can glean, this is exactly what Sperrsatz was, because Fraktur typefaces didn’t have italics or bold. The non-breaking space ensure the word won’t be broken in the middle, and the narrow width is also correct.)

*Update* Idiomdrottning means it’s “faux” because it’s not built-in as formatting, like in TeX and other publishing systems. Fair enough. I agree that manually adding Unicode spaces is a pain.

But, she is correct in saying that Sperrsatz is a terrible way to signal emphasis. This post is a bit of a joke, poking fun at the almost utter lack of semantic signaling in gemtext. No-one would be happier than me if the community could agree that words within asterisks would be equivalent to the <em> tag in HTML, while words within underscores would be <strong>, and we could rely on clients (and screenreaders!) to interpret them as such.

Perhaps this will come in time.

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Updated on Saturday, 2022-02-05

✽ Friday, 2022-02-04
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