[APG Public List] underscores for book title in ASCII-only (Was: Re: Citing a manuscript)

[Ida Skarson McCormick]

On 11/26/2010 8:14 PM, Drew Smith wrote:
> One conventional way to handle this in an ASCII-only environment
> (without the need for all caps) is to use underscores instead.  For
> example:
>
> "Michael Hait is the transcriber of _Records of the Slave Claims Commission_."
>
------------------
Michael & Drew:

Even better than all underscores in the ASCII-only environment (like 
RootsWeb lists) is to use one beginning underscore and one ending 
underscore for book titles, as in _Records of the Slave Claims Commission_.

When I glanced at Drew's message to trim it in the reply, the 
underscores under the whole title had been automatically converted by 
Mozilla Thunderbird to one underscore before and one underscore after 
the title. Does any other e-mail software do this automatically?

I recently generated a couple of sample GEDCOMs to see what they look 
like in a text editor. Unfortunately, the book titles, which are 
italicized on data entry into the genealogical software (TMG), do not 
have any beginning and ending underscores in the GEDCOMs. There's a lot 
to dislike about GEDCOM which is experiencing a resurgence of use 
especially for sharing data associated with DNA testing.

--Ida Skarson McCormick, idamc at seanet.com, Seattle