Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
In my humble opinion, i ≠ em and b ≠ strong. When you're having something read aloud to you, they are different.
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OK. So e.g. I italicise
New York Times but don't emphasise it vocally.
However, I've never seen a commercial book that made that distinction.
Either they use i throughout, or em throughout, for everything: emphasis, book titles, headings, foreign words, etc.
Most of the big corporate ones used em, but if so never used i.
And none of my clients has ever mentioned this distinction to me. Certainly none of the authors have.
And if I was making a text-to-speech app, it would be foolish to expect the text to be coded according to this rule, because hardly any is. It would have to either emphasise all italics, or have an exception list of commonly italicised words.
Anyway, I make books to read and look good on paper or screen.
if someone wants to run it through a TTS engine, good luck to them. They can pay me if they want me to prep the text for that.