Re: [Groff] underlining in nroff

[Werner LEMBERG]

> In the "Spaces between words" part, the first line is displayed
> completely in underline mode.  In particular, the spaces between the
> words are in underline mode.  What did you mean when you said you
> get different results?

Sorry, this was a misunderstanding by me.

> In the "Underscores between words" part, the underscores are not
> displayed in underline mode, but (probably) in bold mode.  Actually,
> as the last screenshot shows, the bold underline looks nearly
> identical to the normal underline, so it's hard to tell.

Indeed.

> To clarify things, you can try this.  Set these environment
> variables to printable strings like this:
>  setenv LESS_TERMCAP_us '<U>'
>  setenv LESS_TERMCAP_ue '</U>'
>  setenv LESS_TERMCAP_md '<B>'
>  setenv LESS_TERMCAP_me '</B>'
> This will cause less to output these HTML-like strings instead of
> the escape sequences it would normally use to enable and disable
> underline and bold modes.  Then if you less your file, it will be
> easier to see exactly what modes are being used.

Yes, this is a good suggestion (I haven't known this feature), and
less works as expected.

You wrote earlier:

> An underlined underscore would be treated the same way, except that
> it just so happens that the bold attribute (overstriking a character
> with itself) takes precedence, so an underscore overstruck with an
> underscore is displayed as an underscore in bold, not underlined.
> Clearly there's no way to tell the intent in this case, so I don't
> think there's a strong argument to do it one way or the other,
> although I'm open to arguments that underlining would be more
> appropriate than bold in this case.  (Looking at the context of the
> surrounding characters is a possible, although rather ugly,
> solution.)

May I ask that you implement this context feature?  I think I've never
seen a bold underline surrounded by underlined text (and vice versa).
So if characters at both sides are underlined (bold) or a space on one
side (skipping other underscore characters for this test), the
underscore should be underlined (bold) also.


    Werner