Talk:Emphasis (typography)

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 January 2021 and 5 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Cire2002.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:33, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Deleted remark
"Bold is also the name of an American hardcore punk band on Revelation Records."

I deleted the above because it didn't really seem to belong in an article about Emphasis (typography).Chuck 20:57, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * That's because "Bold" redirects to this page. I created a disambiguation page, therefore.  [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 21:54, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

Bringing emphasis onto emphasis
Purely out of irony, it seems beneficial, perhaps even necessary, to bring further emphasis onto the article for emphasis. Perhaps we can emphasize emphasis by emphasizing its importance via a link on the main page, in emphasized font. Guys, let's make it happen. Oh, and I should note; I am very emphatic about this! 67.189.88.109 (talk) 21:00, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Emphasis in other languages
Cyrillic also uses italics but several lowercase letters are very different in their italic form than their normal form. Notably the Cyrillic "b", "g", "i", "p", "t". For those with appropriate fonts: в г и п т -> в г и п т This is surely noticed more by English-speakers trying to learn Russian than to native speakers. Apparently Bulgarian or another Cyrillic-using language uses different italic forms of some letters to what is used in Russian and this has been an issue in Unicode, at least for some.

Japanese places a series of dots along the words/letters. I think they're at the bottom of horizontal text and to the left of vertical text. I do not know whether Chinese or Korean use or have used this technique.

Hebrew did not traditionally have italics but does so in the modern age. Despite the fact that Hebrew text runs from right to left, Hebrew italics still slope in the same direction as Latin italics.

Arabic can make use of kashidas which space out the letters in a word but this is probably more to do with justification in body text and stylization in logos.

&mdash; Hippietrail 15:40, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

about cut
I cut this:

The example text reads: "An example of German text in Fraktur in which a portion of the text is spaced out. It is noticed, as with boldface, clearly as opposed to the rest of the text.

The example text wasn't that, it was a text about pianos. Zeimusu | Talk page 11:01, 27 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmm. RIght. But the example text is not even an example of letterspacing, it is an example of using a different kind of fraktur face for emphasis. Weird.—Gniw (Wing) 15:42, 27 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I have just moved that example to where it belongs (way up in the article). Someone can find a real example of letterspacing in blackletter.—Gniw (Wing) 21:57, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I added a request for a citation of Nazi Germany's abolishment of blackletter faces in 1942; though I don't really doubt it, it'd be interesting and helpful to have more detail on that.


 * This has been quite thoroughly discussed in Schwabacher. No need to do it here again, it has nothing to do with emphasis. Ceplm (talk) 10:10, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

i added request for daily updates. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.174.207.157 (talk) 12:01, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Not aggry with this redirect
emphasis is not necessary in bold. For example, in HTML, by default on many web browser, the tag &lt;em> (accronym for emphasis) is displayed in italic non bold. And bold can have many semantique usage. For example, in a bold text, a single world in normal font weight will be, in a way, highlighted. This article should be rename Bold and one could be created for emphasis as it's a more abstract notion. [|Lacrymocéphale]

Eyeballs
Figure 1 says boldface attracts the human eyeball. That sounds a little weird, shouldn't it be eye instead ? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.103.11.58 (talk) 09:23, 31 March 2007 (UTC).

Nonsensical Reference to Fig. 1
The text says, 'As can be seen in Fig. 1, the "w" letter, for example, looks quite different in italic compared to the regular typeface,' but Fig. 1 doesn't support this. It shows a sample of a sans-serif type where the there is little or no apparent difference between the roman and italic forms (other than slantedness). What's more, there's no lowercase roman 'w' to compare with the italic.

I couldn't find any previous version where this made sense, although it does appear the image was changed on 10 Sept 2006. Perhaps that editor introduced the inconsistency without realizing it? Ezrakilty 20:09, 15 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Maybe whatever it is that is rendering the svg is incorrectly rendering the italic text as oblique (or whoever "corrected" the image into svg marked the text as oblique rather than italic; or the svg format itself fails to make a distinction between the two?). Unfortunately the original png is gone so we can't revert to the original image. Shame. 138.38.148.251 (talk) 15:45, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Fig. 1 and 2 issues (and another unrelated problem)
Three things:

--If there's no good reason why Fig. 1 is after Fig. 2, the "1" and "2" in the captions and in the text should be switched.

--What's currently "Fig. 1" is cut off on the right side, and the bold and italic words are out of order.

--The "Methods & use of emphasis" section states that "boldface makes text darker than the surrounding text", which isn't true: boldface only make the text appear darker because it's thicker. --ElectricMuffin (talk) 23:20, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

in physics & math, boldfaced type is used to indicate that a quantity is a Vector, videlicet, it is an amount ==in a certain direction==. But when handwriting (as on a classroom blackboard), the convention is to put a line over the letter, as bolding handwriting is difficult. But is it impossible? Can there be any way to handwrite in true-bolding? 121.97.59.62 (talk) 08:53, 22 February 2010 (UTC)alanmark@breakthru.com

Plain-text options
When transcribing to plain-text, I wrap words in slashes to indicate /italics/ in the source; asterisks to indicate *boldface*; and underscores to indicate _underlining_. I include a note about this, so that anyone transcribing back to a rich format can reproduce the original. I believe this is relatively common; should it perhaps be mentioned, in addition to the mention of using CAPITALS to indicate both italics and boldface, as is/was often done with, e.g., typewriters? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.105.228.40 (talk) 16:48, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Letter spacing
The section about letter spacing lacks citations and the etymology of sperren is different from the one given in SAOB, where the Swedish word spärra is given an etymology from Middle Low German speren 'to stretch out'.--Edaen (talk) 08:59, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Sperren is a very common term in Germany, German for letter-spacing, definitely not restricted to blackletter: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrsatz (E-Kartoffel (talk) 09:56, 9 July 2011 (UTC))

Other-language versions
I noticed that most of the links to this page in other language are links to their articles on boldface, not emphasis in general. The Japanese one notes that boldface is not much used in Japanese! I'm not sure how we can fix this, except by creating articles in foreign languages, but it worries me some. 156.56.169.90 (talk) 01:09, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Letter-spacing in Cyrillic
The article says it is absolete because italic and small capital fonts became available. It is not true. First, Cyrillic italic fonts have been wide-spread and freely avialable since at least the 19th century (but small capitals were not traditional in Cyrillic typography, hence there were not many of such fonts indeed). Second, letter-spacing is not obsolete in Cyrillic typography. Although the statement refers to a source (Bringhurst), the source obviously contradicts the facts.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:41, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Color confusion
The word "color" on this article looks like a red link. Jianzuilang (talk) 16:18, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Bold (disambiguation) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 17:48, 23 December 2023 (UTC)