On 15 Sep 08, at 13:03, Jim McKenney wrote: > I have long regretted the lack of italics capability on this forum Lack of italics? Ah, dear people, the gurus who figured out how to make plain text email work, many eons ago, had a solution: /this is in italics/ _this is underlined_ (and may get translated into italics per old typographic convention) *this is emphasized* (probably bold in print) Therefore I can write My patch of /Veriolitsis glomulama/, family Gloumlaceoideae, is blooming its silly head off at the moment. The local pipistrelle bats are very happy. See? Now, wasn't that just as easy as pie? On 15 Sep 08, at 9:34, David Ehrlich wrote: > . . . the x for hybrids is not the letter ex, but a multiplication sign; it should not have serifs, and it should be centered with the text, not on the line like an alphabetic letter. On Windows machines, alt+0215 gets it for you. On Unicode machines, e.g. Linux, it's a little trickier to compose characters in an analogous way, so it's probably easier to set it up in one of the character palettes where it can be easily accessed via the usual point'n'drool interface. That it disappeared is likely due to × being transliterated to x in the mail list software. I suspect that all of us use computers that have the multiplication sign handy. This is a detail of the list software that might benefit from being revisited. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate on beautiful Vancouver Island http://maps.google.ca/maps/…