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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

I'm enamored of the org-mode textual formatting convention: •bold︎•, /italic/, _underline_, =literal=, and ~strikethrough~. Although `literal` a la Markdown is arguably better, I prefer the other choices.

Especially because org-mode lets you italicize //Face/Off// by adding more slashes, and so on for the others, like ==e = mc^2==.

Incidentally, I have no idea how you're typing literal asterisks, I gave up and am kinda jealous.

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A small nitpick,

its actually ~code~ and +strikethrough+ .

[Official documentation](https://orgmode.org/org.html#Emphasis-and-Monospace)

/italic/ is also how it used to be done way back in the early BBS/MUD/MUSH days (along with _underline_)

Yes I think this makes much more sense to me since the / operators align with how the characters in italic looks once it is applied ( Slightly tilted )

And underline.

I dont understand why they aren't used that way any more.

Judging from the indenting, the poster used HN’s codeblock/verbatim formatting for the asterisks. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

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.

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.

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.

[0]: https://imgur.com/cq7BMex

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 )

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!

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