4 ms·
It’s an old convention that underline in a manuscript (handwritten or typewritten) directs the typesetter to use italics (as underlines are basically nonexisten
by mananaysiempre 1y ago
It’s an old convention that underline in a manuscript (handwritten or typewritten) directs the typesetter to use italics (as underlines are basically nonexistent in professional typesetting before the WWW). I expect that this is where the _italics_ thing (which predates Markdown) comes from. (There is precedent for /italics/ and I don’t think it’s unreasonable, but it is much rarer.)
- chrisldgk 1y agoTo add to this, when I went to school for design a long time ago, our typography teacher basically told us to never use underlines if we can use italics instead. It tends to mess with the readability of a paragraph and shifts the visual center of gravity downward, making text more difficult to parse. I assume that’s also why italics and underline seem to be used interchangeably from time to time, since they generally achieve the same goal of emphasizing text in the same semantic manner.