[XeTeX] Underline thickness and position for Type1

[Jonathan Kew]

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