Forums Bug Reports Italics reading in mIRC 7

I noticed/stumbled upon the ability to use italics in the mIRC 7 client. When I post to other clients (not mIRC ones. Things like Colloquy and such) they see italics.

When someone using the Colloquy client posts to me in italics, I see it in the inverted color mode, as if they hit ctrl+r, not ctrl+i.

I'm usin the 7.03 beta and he's using Colloquy 2.3 (4693) - Mac OS X 10.6.3 (Intel).

This is with a clean mirc.ini


Edit: I know this could also be an issue with Colloquy but if this isn't... well, there you go. 8D

Edit 2: I used ctrl+r in a post to him, inverting colors. He saw italics. O.o

Colloquy is to blame, then. The same thing will happen in 6.35 with Ctrl+R since that control code hasn't changed, meaning the problem has been around for quite some time (the reverse code has been around in mIRC since 5.x, so something like 10 years). It seems that Colloquy handles reverse as italic and the new italic as reverse, so perhaps you should file a bug with them for "incorrect" Ctrl+R behaviour-- and then while they're fixing Ctrl+R they can swap it with italic and everything will work fine.

Eh, I just ran into it and thought I'd throw it up, just in case.

I don't even know where to post this kind of information on their site, so I'm probably not going to. ^^;

I have not used Colloquy myself, so I can't be sure why this is happening. However, based on your description: mIRC sends italics as control code 29, which Colloquy correctly interprets as italics. So far so good :-) However Colloquy appears to send italics as control code 22, which mIRC has always interpreted as reverse.

Is it possible that the Colloquy user is pressing the wrong key combination? Perhaps Control+I in Colloquy means "invert" as opposed to "italics"? Or perhaps Colloquy is unable to display reverse text and displays both control codes 22 and 29 as italics?

Update: I just noticed that when you sent Control+R to the user, the user saw italics :-) So it sounds like Colloquy cannot display reverse text and has chosen to interpret both control codes 22 and 29 as italics when receiving text, and to use control code 22 for italics instead of reverse when sending text.

Looks like Colloquy was never made to handle reverse.

Tested against other clients. Bersirc (an open source IRC client) sees Reverse and Italics just fine. Hydra IRC sees them both and transmits back just fine. X-Chat sees reverse but not Italics.

Anyway, yeah, it has to be Colloquy's issue, not mIRC.

Edit: I did post to Colloquy but they're claiming mIRC's not conforming to IRC standards when it comes to this, even though most other clients I've found have handled it the same way... Oh well. I did my job. :< (Oh, and pIRCH98 does the same as Colloquy, but it's obsolete, so.)

Hi everyone, hi Mythos,

I didn't claim mIRC is breaking any standards.

What I did say was "[…] also, italics is not a new thing in the world of irc, and mirc should probably comply to what other clients have been doing for quite a while…". Please note, that this was before reading this thread (had to find it first) and without looking at what Colloquy actually does, i just knew that we had italics support since forever, and that there never was a report about incompatibilities.

Actually, to my knowledge these control codes are not part of any "official" or unofficial irc specs, which makes it even more important for us irc client devs to try to stay compatible to each other, which is what i meant by that.

So thanks for the report and the additional research, we are tracking this issue at http://colloquy.info/project/ticket/2087.

Alex

I tend to mis-interpret things a lot. Sorry. (I've also had a friend who uses Colloquy being very snotty to me the entire time I've been looking into this, which has been making feel very jaded on the whole matter. :/)

I apologize for reading between the lines too much.

And while we're at it, maybe Colloquy should comply with what mIRC has been doing for even longer. As mentioned, the reverse control code has been available as ASCII 22 for roughly a decade, yet Colloquy chose to use this character for italics. This is technically a separate issue, but it's very closely related. It's likely that mIRC had to choose ASCII 29 for italics because ASCII 22 was already in use. If Colloquy had been compliant with what mIRC has been doing for a decade now, then it would not be using a control code for italics that was already in use for something else.

I can't speak for the behaviour of other clients, but as I recall, Ircle was the only client to implement control codes prior to mIRC, so mIRC has been doing this since before what Colloquy defines as "forever". I could be wrong here, and please point out if I am, but I'm pretty sure ASCII 22 was in use for reverse before any client had implemented support for italics, which made it reserved in this defacto-standard world of IRC we live in. Colloquy need not support reverse, but it should recognize its existence and select a more appropriate control code for italics.

Edit: For reference, mIRC added initial support for reverse at the same time support for bold and colours were first added; mIRC 4.7 in 1996:

Hello Alex, thanks for your post, much appreciated.

If I recall correctly, at one time Mac IRC clients were unable to display reverse text and so chose to display control code 22 as italics instead of reverse. It may be that subsequent Mac IRC clients assumed that control code 22 was meant to be interpreted as italics. That is just a guess however.

I am fairly sure that mIRC has interpreted control code 22 as reverse since 1995. I hope it will not be too much trouble to synchronize control codes. If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything else I can be reached at khaled@mirc.com.