laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (10/09/83)
I am seeing this construction : @i(mumble) a fair bit these days in groups like net.books and net.sf-lovers. is this some new way to reference books? (or just a nefarious plot to get those of us who still use the @ character as line kill??) laura creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (10/12/83)
For all the rest of you who were wondering: the @i(text) form that appears
in articles from time to time is the way to tell Scribe (a reasonably
popular word processor) to italicize the text. I don't know of any news
interfaces that run their text through Scribe, so I assume the writer just
thought it would be better than going to ALL CAPS or *bracketing with
asterisks*, which seem to be the most common ways here.
Tim Maroney
geo@watarts.UUCP (10/14/83)
Laura asks, "what is it with this @i(mumble) stuff?" I asked that of someone who had posted an article containing such a construction, about eight months ago. He told me that this is they way one indicates to the scribe text formatter, that a phrase should be in italics. He told me that he had seen other people use it, so he felt it was a generally understood convention. My initial reaction was the same as Laura's; I tuned out the part I didn't understand, and tried to figure out what the person was saying by context. Cordially, Geo Swan, Integrated Studies, University of Waterloo (allegra||ihnp4)!watmath!watarts!geo
fair@ucbvax.UUCP (10/16/83)
Laura, I checked the jargon file, and there is no reference to @i[word], but I seem to recall that it is syntactically the same as *word* or \word/, (i.e denoting emphasis). From a long time ARPAnaut, Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucb-arpa