[XeTeX] Underline thickness and position for Type1

[Jonathan Kew]

On 14 May 2009, at 00:05, Pander wrote:

> Peter Dyballa wrote:
>>
>> Am 12.05.2009 um 21:28 schrieb Pander:
>>
>>> Accodding to the PFA file (conversion of ASCII of the PFB) for  
>>> Century
>>> Schoolbook L, different underline thickness and postion are  
>>> defined for
>>> regular, bold, bold italic and italic. Being (in the same order) for
>>> thickness: 61, 60, 54 and 42.
>>
>>
>> Other font families use the same thickness. (It's seems possible to
>> imitate underlining with an \rule which computes a word's length  
>> accepts
>> a line thickness.)
>
> Also the toun package has some more functions with this.
>
> But, returning to my original question, should I file a bug report  
> for this?

You could, but I doubt anything will be done to change it. I'm not  
aware of any TeX-based software that would use the underline thickness  
and position values from fonts to control the LaTeX \underline  
construct. This (and similar "underlining" macros) does not handle  
underlining as a font-style attribute at all (like boldness, slant,  
etc); it simply draws a rule under the text, independently of the font  
in use.

Is there a compelling reason this should be handled differently?  
Underlining is not generally considered good typographic practice; it  
is usually a hand- or type-written substitute for italics or other  
typeface choices that were not available via more limited technologies.

JK