Whitespace and emphasis

[Michel Fortin]

I've just found this interesting comment in the TextPattern forums.  
It talks about why Textile doesn't work well with Japanese text and  
Markdown does a better job. Basically it's because Markdown can make  
emphasis and links in the middle of words -- there is no space in a  
Japanese sentense.

This is something to keep in mind if we ever change Markdown's middle- 
word emphasis.

From: <http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=12827>

>> Regarding the strong and em tags in the second line: Textile  

>> deliberately ignores character span tags that are bounded on both  

>> sides by word characters, because something like vis-a-vis  

>> shouldn’t become vis<del>a</del>vis. So I wouldn’t expect those  

>> two fragments to work in any language. If it worked that way  

>> before, it was a bug. (Is there something unique about Japanese  

>> that would make that useful? Not that I think Textile should have  

>> language specific exceptions, I’m just curious).

> No it never worked, that is the first reason why we started using  

> MarkDown to input Japanese text.

>

> A typical Japanese sentence doesn’t contain any white space at all,  

> it is a long string of characters; if any white space is used, it  

> would be the Japanese white space, but that is exceptional. And  

> that is where Textile fails. I don’t know which voodoo MarkDown  

> performs — or rather Michel Fortin’s port, but strong, em and links  

> work well, so far. (ok, for links I guess it is due to the syntax:  

> [linktext](url "title")).

Text case (prior in the thread) for textile syntax:
<http://emps.l-c-n.com/bm/textile-test.txt>


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/