Is it really a widespread habit?

If we must use a slash, I think Mark's "only one before" is best.

> ‛bracketing’

Ah, I see what you did there. :-)
But in some fonts it looks wonky.

hhp

IMO including a "trailing bracket" is good in situations where you want to pluralize, e.g. "Which of these /R/s is working best?"

IMO including a "trailing bracket" is good in situations where you want to pluralize, e.g. "Which of these /R/s is working best?"

I get what you mean, but that could still be confused as R/s (arr slash ess, arr or ess) rather than R's. Or maybe we need to what Hrant said: which one of the Aarghs is working best?

Ultimately I think any solution has the potential to be confused or misunderstood. That's why I'd like to remove declaration or bracketing and use wording to mark with. Is "I love the R." confusing at all? Especially when prefixed with "uppercase" or "lowercase", it's not really ambiguous. Even if we came up with a great declaration system, bad writing still makes it a fail.

@oldnick: Since there are no formal conventions,

I’m not sure what you meant by “formal conventions,” Nick; but this topic is usually addressed in publishing style guides. For instance, The Chicaco Manual of Style, 15th edition, has this to say:

§7.63 Letters as letters. Individual letters and combinations of letters of the Latin alphabet are usually italicised.

    the letter q
    a lowercase n
    a capital W
    The plural is usually formed in English by adding s or es.
    He signed the document with an X.
    I need a word with two e’s and three s’s.

I think that if there was a shortcut, italicizing characters would be the best option to adress glyphs. It's not so obtrusive, but emphasizes the text sufficiently. It would be great if typophile’s renewed layout would allow you to set a text in italics easily (e.g. via a shortcut or a button), instead of having to recur to the <em>-tag.

It's not difficult to make a little shortcut that adds the <em> tag using something like TextExpander. Probably easier than getting a character style feature added to Typophile.

If you're going for extra keystrokes, use guillemets.

hhp

Italicization is no good for type discussions, because one might think it referred specifically to an italic glyph.

It seems unlikely to me that italics would be interpreted by readers here as referring specifically to an italic glyph. I think italics is a sufficient way to do it.

But then the fact that < em > is rendered in italic is just a convention.

Wow! That's quite the smørgåsbord you have spread out here. And in the end, most will likely use single ASCII quotes to delimit the letter anyway.

Right: there could be a number of ways <em> could be rendered. It could be reversed, or have a different background color (highlight), or use a different font or color.

How about curly (smart) quotes, wrapped in double prime, followed by the unicode value – all in a different color and weight?

Personally, I like and use the /a method.

I favour the /a/ approach. Clear and easy to type.

I'd likely have to go with the 'a' as / is a shifted character on my keyboard.