On Nov 5, 2006, at 12:24 PM, Sam Aaron wrote:
Oops, sorry.
I didn't realise that emails had a message id. If they do, then another important question is why doesn't Apple's Mail use them. It threads emails by subject which breaks an awful lot of times. I have thought to myself a few times... if only emails had thread ids...
Well its threading is not perfect, but it does work decently, like in this case. I use Mail.app also, and your message showed up threaded under the WebPreview message.
Anyway, to answer your question, it's because most of the times when you want italic, you really want \emph, i.e. you want the text to show differently than the surrounding text. \emph does the right thing if you are for instance inside a definition environment, where the regular text is highlighted.
In sort, it's because in LaTeX you want to emphasize structure over appearance, and that's what \emph does.
Btw, when I use "you" here, I mean it in the generic sense. YMMV. I personally always use ctrl-shift-w instead.
...you learn a new thing every day. :-)
Sam
Haris