On Fri, Sep 10, 2010, Ted Harding wrote: > I made a serious attempt myself some years ago to try to crack the > underlining problem. The basic issue, of course, is that .cu, or .ul, > as you say, simply switches to "underlined font" (which in general > is italic). > ... > One has the feeling that one could reach out and graso it, but it > always seems to be just a few inches further w=away than the length > of one's arm ...
True enough. At one point, I even played around with using sed to insert underscores under characters and spaces (remember, I'm mostly interested in solving this issue for simulated typewriter-style output, so I doesn't have to be pretty) into a completed diversion. The idea was to write the diversion to a file, then replace every printable character with \Z'<x>'_ and every space with \:\Z' '_ Once I figured out how many times to escape the backslash for the rhs of the sed expression called with .sy (six, in case anyone's interested), the solution *almost* worked, except that I ended up with underscored spaces at the start of every line after the first in multi-line passages. I then got to wondering if there were a way of establishing where groff would break lines when a diversion was output. Something like .asciify, but instead of returning the diversion to its original state, it asciified the formatted output line-for-line. If such a thing existed, or so I reasoned, I could write a sed expression for ends of lines as well, and thus trick groff into doing exactly what I wanted when the diversion was introduced into the output stream. Sadly, there is no such magical asciify. -- Peter Schaffter Author of The Binbrook Caucus http://www.schaffter.ca
