Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!pyramid!leadsv!mth
From: mth@leadsv.UUCP (Mike Heideman)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: HELP: nroff and laser printers
Message-ID: <2378@leadsv.UUCP>
Date: 7 Mar 88 23:26:41 GMT
References: <4740@ecsvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: mth@leadsv.LEADS.LMSC.COM.UUCP (Mike Heideman)
Organization: LMSC-LEADS, Sunnyvale, Ca.
Lines: 34
Keywords: nroff device driver laser printer italics underline

In article <4740@ecsvax.UUCP> dfh@ecsvax.UUCP (David Hinnant) writes:
>One more question on a slightly different subject:  How can I generate 
>undelining in troff.  I have ditroff and devps on another machine.  My
>".ul" commands turn italics on instead.... 

Regarding your question of how to do underlining in troff (as opposed
to nroff).  First, if you use the -me macro package, then you can
simply use the .u macro.  That is what I do.  Alternatively, check out
section 12.4 of the NROFF/TROFF User's Manual.  It shows how to set up
a macro (.us) that will underscore a string.  There is an obvious typo
in the example - it should be

	.us "underlined words"

rather than .ul .

The .u macro of -me is essentially the same, but allows a second
argument that appends additional text in the original font.  See
Section 7 of the -ME Reference Manual for the documentation.

Note that both of these underlining schemes screw up if the underlined
text ends up getting broken across a line or if horizontal movement is
done.  I know from personal experience.

I had a need to underline some column headings for a small table,
where I wanted each heading individually underlined - hence tbl was
not appropriate.  The .u macro could not handle this; I was using \k's
and \h's for the columns and the underlining came out offset.  I ended
up putting a bunch of spaces as the second argument to .u, which
worked, but required several iterations to line up properly.
-- 
Mike Heideman - Lockheed Palo Alto Research Labs.
UUCP: sun!sunncal!dipl!mth
      sun!sunncal!leadsv!mth