Render italic text differently than bold text

[preetmishra]

Currently, we use msg_bold for bold and italic text. While this does differentiate the two from the rest of the message, the distinction between these two remains unaddressed.

We could try using 'italics' setting from urwid. However, if we choose not to go with that (due to support concerns), we could try adding a new style in themes.py that provides a notable distinction.

[preetmishra]

@zulipbot add "message rendering" "UI" "good first issue"

[neiljp]

Before we implement this, note that the theming is possibly more complex than initially expected: this needs to cope with not just bold or italic, but also bold and italic - and so potentially the style needs to easily overlap with bold, or we would need two extra themes (which is a bit less clean).

[Ezio-Sarthak]

Hi @neiljp . Would you like to start discussing the issue? I think it is possible to make a font italic and bold. What I tried simply was to add both bold and italics in the palette.

Please let me know if I am missing something.

[neiljp]

@Ezio-Sarthak It may work in one terminal, but I'm not sure of the widespread support for this, or how well it displays if it is not supported. I started a topic on czo for this: #zulip-terminal>Italic styling #T609.