On Friday 21 January 2005 02:09 pm, Al Haines (shaw) wrote:
One of those messages, dated Nov 12, 2004, indicated that the PG FAQ's would be updated to indicate the use of asterisks (*) to mark bold text, similar to PG's FAQ V.94's standard of using underscores to indicate italicized text. Was this update ever done?
Why would PG decide to use a character commonly used to denote an OCR error as the bold type marker in ASCII files? Even gutcheck flags this as a possible error, and with it used that way, the WW and others will have to wade through a bunch of false positives from the output, or jim (poor guy) would have to add even more parsing to the gutcheck routines to try to reduce these false positives. Guess what's more likely to happen? I realize that (*) as bold was practice in the historical days of usenet, irc, etc., but it doesn't make any sense to me to use asterisk (*) in this fashion in an ebook. I've been seeing and usually use plus-sign (+) to indicate boldface. David