Re: [Groff] underlining

[Peter Schaffter]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2014, Ted Harding wrote:
> I would not wholly agree with this!

I'm in Ted's camp on this.  It's far too general a statement to say
"underlining is bad typography".  In many contexts, the statement simply
isn't true.  More significantly, it doesn't do justice to real-world
typesetting, where underlining may be desirable, not necessarily
for typographic beauty, but simply because the creator of the
document wants it.

Over the years, the absence of an underlining request has caused me
no end of irritation within the framework of the mom macros.  One
of the mom options is to produce "typewritten/double-space" copy
observing all the rules (yes, there are institutions that still
demand it) and that means underlining italic passages.  I tried many
approaches to solving the issues surrounding underlining in macro
space, but in the end went for what amounts to a kludge, originally
suggested by Tadziu, namely doing it at the PostScript level with
\X.

But that's mom, which has some special requirements with respect
to underlining.  Outside of the mom macros, Werner's "Ultimative
Underline Macro", which I've tested, does what the name suggests.  I
still think an underlining request should be considered for groff,
but perhaps a compromise would be to add Werner's macro to the tmac
directory.  It's in the archives (Dec. 18, 2003).

> At least in ms macros, the ".UL" will underline whatever it is given
> as an argument; but this does not live well with line-breaks. So a
> macro which can smoothly underline a section of text that may break
> across lines is a Good Thing (though very awkward to implement in
> groff).

Amen.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
http://www.schaffter.ca