Re: [Groff] {Groff] underlining

[Deri James]

On Tue 08 Jul 2014 09:10:05 Doug McIlroy wrote:
> As has been pointed out, underlining by macro is at best inconvenient
> in filled text. Thus it was proposed that underline, and perhaps
> strike-through might be a groff primitive like .bd. All these capabilities
> may be understood as ways to decorate individual characters.
>  There are other
> such things one might want to do, such as strike-through with /.
> 
> Maybe we need a more general facility, in terms of which a whole
> array of effects can be defined. One possibility is a primitive,
> say .decorate m, which applies macro m to every text character
> until .decorate with no argument. Several decorations could be
> applied to every character.
> 
> The proposal raises some questions. (1) Does white space get decorated?
> (2) How about punctuation? (3) Do multiple decorates terminate together,
> or do they nest? One can come up with answers to these quesions, but
> the first issue is whether this is an idea worth pursuing.
> 
> Doug

One wrinkle with this approach is when traps are invoked, if a particular 
decoration is in 
effect when a trap is sprung, it is unlikely the decoration is wanted for any 
text output 
during that trap. This may be solved by making .decorate private to an 
environment 
but there is no requirement that traps have to use a separate environment.

Deri