What is the minimum of typographic form necessary to legibly reproduce a text and/or to write? Italic, the underline, a space between paragraphs.
There is a possible book in which italics, say, do several kinds of work: to indicate citation, proper name, but also (at the same time) as an emphasis.
What would it mean to collapse these semantic orders into a single distinction?
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What happens when a highly designed text is stripped of typographic differentiation? What is lost?
Or if only an italic is granted, what is the most rudimentary conceptual distinction italicized text would express?