Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!umich!sharkey!sbcs!max!graham
From: graham@max.physics.sunysb.edu (Graham Collins)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: underlining large blocks of text for submittable manuscript
Keywords: underline
Message-ID: <1990Jul10.011954.18294@max.physics.sunysb.edu>
Date: 10 Jul 90 01:19:54 GMT
Sender: graham@max.physics.sunysb.edu (Graham P. Collins)
Reply-To: graham@max.physics.sunysb.edu (Graham P. Collins)
Followup-To: comp.text.tex
Organization: Institute for Theoretical Physics, SUNY at Stony Brook
Lines: 30

What I want is a macro \un which will take

\un{block of text}

and produce an underlined version of "block of text"

For a block of text which does not run over more than one line, the
TeXbook provides a suitable macro using mathmode. However, what I need
is one which will still break lines appropriately when the block of
text runs on for more than one line.

I've made various attempts myself, but they've all failed,
demonstrating there's something I don't know about how arguments are
passed to other macros. My strategy was to have \un split off the
first word and underline it with the
TeXbook's macro, and then \un{the remainder} provided the remainder
wasn't empty. However, all the
variants I tried either didn't correctly parse off each word or else the
recursion never successfully terminated.

Any suggestions? (The TeXbook advises making a new font with metfont!)
The relevance of the query is that most magazines, unlike academic
journals, regard italicising in manuscripts as a sign of
amateurishness---which will seriously harm a budding writer's chances
of publication.

Graham P. Collins
graham@max.physics.sunysb.edu
collins@sbnuc1.sunysb.edu
collins@sunysbnp.bitnet