Why wouldn't using an italic alphabet not be available when handwriting?
Well, you can, but I doubt if many people would notice the difference between, say, an italic
e and an ordinary e in handwriting. Bold is even harder to write.
I remember that bold symbols like vectors had to be handwritten as underlined characters because otherwise nobody could see the boldness, but that was a hack, and when they made it into print they generally reverted to bold symbols,
v rather than underlined symbols
v.
If you prefer emboldened text that's up to you, leave everyone else to their own preferences. Maybe you have a great deal of experience in this kind of thing.
I think you have forgotten the purpose of this forum, BH! Anyway, underlining has had its day. It was always a compromise, when typefaces in bold and italic for
headings and
emphasis, came into common usage. It is no longer needed now that word processing is so common, apart from in a typed or written document for markup purposes. Even its use in hyperlinks is less common now.
Did the underscore even exist before typewriters? Anyone know? To be governed by a
deficiency in typewriters, which were only invented in the 1860s, and to use underline rather than italic or bold, seems a strange convention, to say the least.
Edit: Isn't the egregious typewriter also responsible for us having to have both
Carriage Return and
Line Feed?
