<i>, <em> or <span> for italics ?

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Hitch

And...in which fonts would we find that, she wondered‽ In my world, lads and ladies, if the character doesn't exist in fonts, it might as well be a Unicorn.

KpRoman
Vollkorn

Just two examples. Not that I like the character, I prefer !? or ?! (no need for U+1F984)

[JSWolf]

Hitch, in your experience, is there really any difference between <i> and <em> & <b> and <strong>?

[JSWolf]

Jelby, your quote is incorrect. Hitch posted that and you link to the wrong post.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Jellby

KpRoman
Vollkorn

Just two examples. Not that I like the character, I prefer !? or ?! (no need for U+1F984)

Hi:

I did say that, but my point is, in the world of print, which uses thousands of fonts, for all intents an purposes, it doesn't exist. The fact that you had to reach out to special fonts DESIGNED to have everything demonstrates it better than I could.

Don't get me wrong. I like the old interrobang. I think it's stupid, mind you, because it's simply taking the place of existing punctuation that does the job, but why not? But it's not in the VAST number of typical fonts used at a typesetter's on a daily basis...and that means, as I said, it's a unicorn and worse, not even a unicorn that people want. I'm with you on my preferences--nothing wrong with ?! or !?

Hitch

[BetterRed]

Interobang = Coitus interruptus

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Quoth

No, I do get what the difference between <i> and <em> is. I think I'd not use <em> much, but unless I can do wordprocessor source that causes <em>some text</em> to be created, there will only be <i>. Similarly with <b> and <strong>.

Word/LibreOffice as Input (Character Styles)

If you used a Character Style for emphasis, you might get something closer to my example above:

In <i>Book Title</i>, the character said: "Not in <span class="emphasis">my</span> house."

Not ideal, but towards the right direction.

In Fiction, Styles are also important when marking inner thoughts or "telepathic speaking":

<span class="innerthought">Wow, I did <em>not</em> do good at all.</span>

Note: Italics within italics = not italic (Normal/Roman).

What usually happens is you get this in your Word->HTML:

<i>Wow, I did</i> not <i>do good at all.</i>

Ultimately, you would want to aim towards HTML like this:

<i class="innerthought">Wow, I did <em>not</em> do good at all.</i>

plus this tiny line in your CSS:

i em { font-style: normal; }

Originally Posted by Quoth

In an absolute sense true. But if the aim is to automatically go from Wordprocessor source to ebook via a conversion tool (such as Calibre rather than Indesign or Sigil or Amazon something which are more like DTP for ebooks), then what you want is styles and characters that consistently convert to the same sensible XHTML+CSS.

Save As, general conversion tools, or "automatic" one-button press "solutions"... you're probably going to get anything italics:

• turned into 100% <i> or 100% <em>
  
  • See many CMSes/tools.
• output as unreadable-by-human names + different every book
  
  • <span class="CharOverride-2"> + <span class="calibre123">
    
    • (I'm looking at you, InDesign, Calibre, [...])
  • Also see hideous code like JSWolf's "Really Bad CSS" topic.

If you use Styles though, you can take advantage of things like Style Mapping (see InDesign tutorial + help file showing it off). This allows you to directly say:

Change my "Heading-2" style -> <h2> and give it class="XYZ" in the EPUB.

Side Note: There are also tools that do this for Word->InDesign. I definitely wish more tools (especially Calibre) had Style Mapping. Then you could see a list and help nudge Word italics -> <i> + an "emphasis" Style -> <em>.

If you start getting into more specialized conversion tools:

Toxaris's EPUB Tools can export Word Styles -> HTML Classes. It also allows you to choose between <i> or <em> for italics on export. An option like this at least gives some wiggleroom.

Mammoth can be used by those who come up with consistent Styling. This is a much more specialized workflow, but those who (professionally) create many documents can apply more rigid standards.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Unless I outsource final ebook creation to someone else. Then I suppose I can use a character style for <em> and one for <strong> and tell the ebook making guru what those mean.

Again, this is why me+Hitch have been stressing Styles as the #1 thing authors can learn to do.

If you have a clean, well-maintained source document, everyone's life becomes easier/faster. It's at the very core of any future steps.

Originally Posted by Hitch

AND, if that happens, if someone who actually uses Word correctly creates a named style, it will emerge from formatting as a p style or a span, and there endeth the problem.

Now there's the real unicorn. As you say, you could count on one hand the number of authors you've run across (at BookNook) actually using Styles properly.

Luckily, I've been getting slightly better luck in my "Styles training".

Originally Posted by Quoth

Of course the Interobang has never caught on. I've only seen it ever on the Internet in articles discussing it and in ONE book covering punctuation. I've not seen it in any ebook, or any printed novel ever.

Check out those articles+podcast I linked in the Reddit post. It's good stuff, good stuff.

Also, you probably wouldn't get along in Physics or Maths... there's a ton of weird, obscure punctuation and symbol usage there.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes, exactly. Speaking as a formatted, how the hell would I know which emphasized "i" text from Word is meant to be italics, and which are meant to be "emphasized" as in em? Jesus wept!

Hmmm... this may be the one case where Non-Fiction seems much easier. Fiction... maybe not so much. :P

But recently I've been thinking of ways to mark things up, mostly by messing around with my "Non-Linear Editing" ways.

Quicker and More Accurate Tagging

For example, ripping every single <i> out and sorting into an alphabetical list:

<i>Enciclopedia Italiana</i>
<i>New York Times</i>
<i>Volksgemeinschaft</i>
<i>Wall Street Journal</i>
<i>Washington Post</i>
<i>individual</i>
<i>laissez-faire</i>
<i>negative</i>

From a glance, you can usually tell which ones are meant to be <i> (newspapers, book titles, foreign words/terms) and which ones are <em> (individual words).

You could also make pretty decent assumptions like:

• In Non-Fiction, emphasis is probably not going to be in a Bibliography/References page.
• In Fiction, a single word is probably <em> + an entire sentence is more likely <i>.

Real-Life Applications: Over the past two years, I've used sorted "italic lists" to catch hundreds of typos/inconsistencies.

Latest journal I've been working on, I actually marked up proper HTML lang, similar to find all 'foreign words' method I discussed last year in "Export list of words in spellcheck". Benefits were fantastic (multi-language spellchecking + so many less red squigglies).

And last year, I used a similar non-linear method to clean up an entire book's citations. The citations were a mix of many different Style Guides (think copied/pasted exactly as is out of dozens of history books). I pulled all citations, then converted it into a giant spreadsheet (Author/Title/Year/[...]). Imported this into a Citation Management program, and was able to remove duplicates + re-export consistently-styled citations.

Proper markup is key, since information gets ordered and formatted differently depending on if it's a book, newspaper, journal article, etc.

... Further information will probably be supplied in future blog posts.

Originally Posted by Hitch

And...in which fonts would we find that, she wondered‽ In my world, lads and ladies, if the character doesn't exist in fonts, it might as well be a Unicorn.

If it exists in Unicode, Android, billions of people, I'm for it. Who's with me‽

PS. A few months back I actually searched the "middle finger" character on the entire MobileRead... I was the only one who ever used one. So just because a character's "never been seen", doesn't mean it shouldn't be used!

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Jelby, your quote is incorrect. Hitch posted that and you link to the wrong post.

Thanks, it should be fixed now.

[Quoth]

Typing used _this is italics_ and *this is bold*
Some typewriters though don't have separate O 0, I 1 and all only have ' and ", it is annoying we don't have separate symbols for dialogue, quote, emphasis, apostrophe for missing letter and possessive. Some languages do change spelling or stick in an h after the first letter for "of <something>". Interestingly at one stage Greek had no H and used a ' at the start of words that started with an H. Upper and Lower case is also a curious recent invention for Western languages. The alphabet for logical English sponsored by G. Bernard Shaw has no uppercase, it prefixes with a dot.
That and some other markups do work in plain text files imported to most wordprocessors. It's been expanded to ASCIIdoc, which I'd as much want to use as direct HTML or wiki markup.
I'd maybe use LaTex if I was doing serious sciency stuff.

I think the Interobang single character looks too busy at small sizes compared to ?! which people will readily recognise. But likely other languages than English need a different solution.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Word/LibreOffice as Input (Character Styles)

If you used a Character Style for emphasis, you might get something closer to my example above:

In <i>Book Title</i>, the character said: "Not in <span class="emphasis">my</span> house."

Not ideal, but towards the right direction.

In Fiction, Styles are also important when marking inner thoughts or "telepathic speaking":

<span class="innerthought">Wow, I did <em>not</em> do good at all.</span>

Note: Italics within italics = not italic (Normal/Roman).

What usually happens is you get this in your Word->HTML:

<i>Wow, I did</i> not <i>do good at all.</i>

Ultimately, you would want to aim towards HTML like this:

<i class="innerthought">Wow, I did <em>not</em> do good at all.</i>

plus this tiny line in your CSS:

i em { font-style: normal; }

Why would you want <i> and <em> to be normal? That just defeats the purpose.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why would you want <i> and <em> to be normal? That just defeats the purpose.

To differentiate an emphasized word within other words that are already italicized/emphasized...

.internaldialog {font-style:italic}
.internaldialog em {font-style:normal}

<p class="internaldialog">She thought to herself, "<em>Snow White</em>
 is fairer than me‽"</p>

or, the way I like to do it:

em {font-style:italic}
em em {font-style:normal}

<p><em>She thought to herself, "<em>Snow White</em>
 is fairer than me‽"</em></p>

She thought to herself, "Snow White is fairer than me‽"

[Turtle91]

This is especially useful if you use divs for long sections of italicized/emphasized text:

.memory {margin:2em}
.memory p {font-style:italic}
.memory em {font-style:normal; text-decoration:underline; color:blue}

  <p>He remembered when it happened so many years ago:</p>

  <div class="memory">
    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. <em>Nullam</em> nec leo sapien. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>

    <p>Suspendisse <em>fermentum</em> nec mauris sit amet laoreet. Duis placerat bibendum tellus. Nullam fringilla ipsum a justo volutpat feugiat.</p>

    <p>Phasellus nec lorem dignissim, sodales lorem ac, luctus nulla. <em>Vivamus</em> ante est, vulputate a aliquet et, bibendum sit amet leo. Nunc erat leo, eleifend non rutrum vitae, aliquam et velit. Aliquam volutpat sodales orci, id varius nisl gravida in. Curabitur accumsan pellentesque euismod. In ultricies rutrum varius. Aenean fermentum justo id felis sodales condimentum.</p>

    <p>Donec viverra ut sem at ornare. Fusce neque augue, dignissim et metus et, pellentesque pellentesque mauris. <em>Nunc</em> in suscipit ligula, eu efficitur lectus.</p>

    <p>Sed vehicula massa id vulputate mollis.</p>
  </div>

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam nec leo sapien. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Suspendisse fermentum nec mauris sit amet laoreet. Duis placerat bibendum tellus. Nullam fringilla ipsum a justo volutpat feugiat.

Phasellus nec lorem dignissim, sodales lorem ac, luctus nulla. Vivamus ante est, vulputate a aliquet et, bibendum sit amet leo. Nunc erat leo, eleifend non rutrum vitae, aliquam et velit. Aliquam volutpat sodales orci, id varius nisl gravida in. Curabitur accumsan pellentesque euismod. In ultricies rutrum varius. Aenean fermentum justo id felis sodales condimentum.

Donec viverra ut sem at ornare. Fusce neque augue, dignissim et metus et, pellentesque pellentesque mauris. Nunc in suscipit ligula, eu efficitur lectus.

Sed vehicula massa id vulputate mollis.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

To differentiate an emphasized word within other words that are already italicized/emphasized...

But why make <i> be normal?

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But why make <i> be normal?

To differentiate an emphasized word within other words that are already italicized/emphasized..

You can make it anything you want...color, underline, whatever....most emphasis within emphasis are normal....

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

To differentiate an emphasized word within other words that are already italicized/emphasized..

You can make it anything you want...color, underline, whatever....most emphasis within emphasis are normal....

I understand <em> being set to normal to emphasis test in an italicized sentence/paragraph. But my make <i> be normal? That makes no sense.

[Jellby]

Jon, you're missing that there is no comma in the selector. It says:

i em

that is for every <em> inside an <i>. It is not:

i, em

which seems to be what you are bashing at.