Bug 498718

Summary:	Using Gender* in a chat is wrongly interpreted as format-italic
Product:	[Applications] NeoChat	Reporter:	m.wege
Component:	General	Assignee:	Tobias Fella <fella>
Status:	CLOSED NOT A BUG
Severity:	normal	CC:	carl, josh, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	24.12.1
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Neon
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description m.wege 2025-01-16 04:16:56 UTC

In Germany people who prefer a gender-sensitive language often use the so called gender-star (*) to write a text gender independent. E.g. Er*sie (him*her)  or den*die (who). Unfortunately, Neochat does not treat this correctly. It treats the * as format sign, start showing italic text and is not showing the *. Since there is no official way of gender sensitive language, the  genderstar is the preferred method for many, because the German association of the blind consider it as the best of all, not causing misinterpretations by screen reading software. 
I am not sure, if this somehow an upstream bug in the protocol or because Element mishandles the * as well.

How should it be handled correctly. The * should not change the text and just be left as it is.

Comment 1 m.wege 2025-01-16 04:17:52 UTC

(German) source for the recommendation by the association of the blind: https://www.dbsv.org/gendern.html

Comment 2 Nate Graham 2025-01-16 17:00:45 UTC

You can escape the * with a \; in other words, write "Er\*sie". This way the app won't interpret the * character as the beginning of an italicized piece of text

Comment 3 m.wege 2025-01-16 17:19:32 UTC

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #2)
> You can escape the * with a \; in other words, write "Er\*sie". This way the
> app won't interpret the * character as the beginning of an italicized piece
> of text
Thanks for the workaround. But I hope there is a way to fix this technically, because it would not only break the type-flow, but also would mean, everyone knows.

Comment 4 Nate Graham 2025-01-16 17:28:03 UTC

Can you explain what you mean by "everyone knows"? The text you send is public, and everyone will know what it says no matter what you type, right?

Comment 5 m.wege 2025-03-31 07:06:09 UTC

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #4)
> Can you explain what you mean by "everyone knows"? The text you send is
> public, and everyone will know what it says no matter what you type, right?

What I mean that the proposed workaround is not intuitive. How should people know, that they can avoid this bug in this way? It is not a real solution.

Comment 6 m.wege 2025-03-31 07:06:41 UTC

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #4)
> Can you explain what you mean by "everyone knows"? The text you send is
> public, and everyone will know what it says no matter what you type, right?

What I mean that the proposed workaround is not intuitive. How should people know, that they can avoid this bug in this way? It is not a real solution.

Comment 7 Nate Graham 2025-03-31 15:35:41 UTC

A developer closed this bug report; re-closing it. Please don't re-open closed bug reports. Thanks!

Comment 8 Nate Graham 2025-03-31 15:38:06 UTC

To answer your question, people who want to make * not begin a block of italicized text will have to learn to escape it using a backslash. I definitely understand that this is not intuitive if you don't already know it, but the app also can't break basic functionality like markdown styling, which is quite commonly understood.