Re: [Groff] underlining

[Steve Izma]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 11:11:22PM +0200, Carsten Kunze wrote:
> Subject: Re: [Groff] underlining
>
> Underlining is simply bad typography in typesetting. That's why
> italic is used. Technically it had been possible in otroff to
> underline--they did not use it for style reasons.

But that's not Ted's point. Many times over the years I've had to
deal with scholarly books that require an typographical attempt
to indicate how a manuscript has been revised. Such things as
underlining and strike-through are essential for scholars to
understand such changes.

None of the attempts I've seen to use macros for these effects
have worked well. Either some small adjustment is needed to align
things horizontally or else word breaking adds to the
complications.

But as far as I can tell, PostScript fonts have some sort of
built-in ability for underlining that other layout systems seem
to be able to implement. Do these two lines from Utopia-Regular
have anything to do with it?:
        /UnderlinePosition -100 def
        /UnderlineThickness 50 def

Can any PostScript experts out there give us a clue as to how
this might be implemented?

It seems to me that everything would work much more smoothly if
the underline was actually part of the glyph rather than a
superimposition of two glyphs.

        -- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
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