Re: [Groff] Underlining in groff

[Peter Schaffter]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009, Blake McBride wrote:
> That kind-of works but I have two problems with it.
> 
> 1.  What if I'd rather use MM or MOM?
> 
> 2.  The underline is way too far below the line.  If you try underlining a
> word within a paragraph it almost looks like a line in the middle of two
> text lines.  It's is terrible.  Basically, the bottom of a lowercase "y"
> should extend through the line.  If it doesn't look good then the line is
> too thick.

The mom macros have .UNDERSCORE, which allows you to set the
distance of the underscore from the base line.  In addition, there's
the .UNDERSCORE_WEIGHT macro, which allows you to set the rule
weight.  See the html docs.

The only hitch for you might be that UNDERSCORE doesn't work across
lines, and doesn't always work reliably with .JUSTIFY (.ad b).
That's something I've been meaning to fix for a long time--actually,
since Werner pointed the way with his "ultimative underline macro".
Shows how long you can put things off, eh?

I remember being daunted when I first approached the issue of
underscoring text.  For such a basic typesetting function, it seemed
horribly kludgy to implement, especially since there are those
tantalizing .ul and .cu requests for TTY output.  I don't suppose
there's any chance of underlining for the PostScript device being
implemented in groff itself, is there?  Sure would make things a lot
easier.

-- 
Peter Schaffter