Re: OT: italics [was: Re: take the name of org-class event from heading]

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Charles Philip Chan <cpchan@bell.net> wrote:


> Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com> writes:
> 
> > That may be because of the dotage of my mail reader of course (mh-e),
> > so I was wondering if there are any *emacs* mail readers[fn:1] that
> > show the effect? I doubt at this point that I'll ever switch to
> > e.g. gnus to read mail (mh-e and I have grown old together), but I am
> > curious whether something like it handles things properly.[fn:2]
> 
> The Italic is not showing up in Gnus either. This is because the OP is
> not using "mail markup", i.e. /This is Italic/. IMHO, I don't see the
> point of not using ">" as the cite mark- anything else will confuse 99%
> of mailers. This is why I gave up on Supercite.
> 

Thanks for checking and I agree fully with using a quoting mechanism
that will survive the arbitrary travails that a typical mail message
goes through, although "> " is generally used for quoting points one
responds to - see above e.g. I like boxquotes for things like Info
snippets, variable/function docstrings and FAQ entries. That's
inconvenient for code that somebody might want to cut-and-paste in order
to run however (one would need to edit it to get it back into runnable
form), so I use the Message function message-mark-inserted-region to
quote code.

To go back to the italics question though, the italics is part of the font
style spec in the html form of the mail (hence my suspicion that
Thunderbird would not have a problem with that message), so I guess the
question is if there is an emacs mail reader that will interpret
arbitrary HTML markup, the way that T-bird would.

I also did the following experiment: I saved the HTML form of the mail
(decoding it from quoted-printable to HTML with qprint) and looked at it
in Firefox (got italics: no surprise), and in w3m in emacs (with the
oblique capable Liberaion font I mentioned previously, which *can* show
italics): I get no italics in the latter, so I guess even w3m cannot
interpret arbitrary HTML, maybe because the underlying browser is
supposed to be text-only, so font style information does not get
through.

Nick