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
