[XeTeX] Underline thickness and position for Type1

[Pander]

I agree that it is not a high priority feature request / bug report.
However, an optional parameter could be set when selecting a font. By
default the current behaviour(=always the same) for backwards
comparability is an option. Or by default the new situation(=dictated by
the font), in order to promote this new feature, would be a wise
starting point.

I will leave the rest to the guru's. What is the best place to submit
such a request before it gets buried in this thread?

Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 16 May 2009, at 16:11, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
>> Am 16.05.2009 um 16:55 schrieb Pander:
>>
>>> In short, this is a bug which should be fixed?
>>
>> No, this is no bug, because no user uses that font's underline glyph.
>> Of course it should be allowed for an user to use that font's
>> underline glyph to underline some other glyphs of this font.
> 
> The question was about the underline position and thickness parameters
> of the font, not the underline glyph (which may or may not match those
> metrics).
> 
> The appropriate "feature request", if any, would be for a new font
> attribute (analogous to letterspace, embolden, slant) that could be
> added to a \font declaration to specify that the font should be drawn
> with underlining. Then xetex (or rather xdvipdfmx) could use the font's
> underlining metrics to draw the line. Note, however, that this would be
> completely unrelated to existing (La)TeX commands that "underline" text
> by using TeX's \hrule to draw a line below it. Such commands are
> independent of the font in use.
> 
> I'm not convinced this is a high priority, though. And it might not suit
> all purposes, even if it were implemented: for example, using such an
> "underlined font" would give underlining of each word separately, it
> would not span inter-word spaces as TeX does not "draw" space characters
> at all.
> 
> JK