Re: [Groff] underlining

[hohe72]

Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote (Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:15:41
+0100):
> Hi Holger,
> 
> > Doug McIlroy:
> > > (1) Does white space get decorated?
> > 
> > Yes. So it can be distinguished from multiple underlinings.
> 
> Don't quite understand what you mean here?  I guess Doug was thinking
> of the difference between .ul and .cu in nroff.

Underlining yes and no is different than yes and no.
:) _yes_ _no_ <-> _yes no_

Don't know if .ul/.cu is different (not for troff maybe nroff). I
finally skipped underlining provided by groff, using line drawing \l''
instead. 

> > > (2) How about punctuation?
> > 
> > When part of the string or text. So one can text it on the spot.
> 
> What about descenders?  It would be nice if the underline didn't have
> to cross over them, but with more finesse than simply not underlining
> q and p since the start of the q can be underlined and the end of the
> p. Also, I've seen elsewhere g with a broken underline that reappears
> inside its lower loop;  looks very odd.  Don't suppose groff has the
> information to do this but it's possible some backends do, e.g. grops,
> if sufficient intent is passed through to it?

Well, I know that from manual writing at school. A sample of paper
and pen being much superior to computer technology -- easier. My
opinion - however,

this have to be designed especially in the font designs to be applied in
groff, isn't it? That really is art. My experience is, that having a
well tuned baseline underline distance is a sufficient design. While
that depends on vertical space (.vs) applied, it's hard for a font
designer to support the groff-texter.

----

Underlining is barely used and I do so for headlines and single words
only. Implementing a strike through may be different from that. Also a
user might expect, that intersecting of underline and strike through
will do.

So my underlining macros don't respect line breaks as well don't page
breaks. Especially the latter seems to be complicated to code and I
would appreciate support by groff. I imagine length of the text
portions if hyphenation happens, different spacings and so on. Maybe a
\w'' request can simulate typesetting a string and set some registers.

Regards Holger