Problem with NROFF '.cu' command

[Donn Seeley]

Some poor user came to me with a sad NROFF story (yes, I know there
are lots of sad NROFF stories).  She has to enter some papers for
a supervisor and this other person insists that titles in their
bibliography have continuous underlining -- underlining individual
words is completely unsatisfactory.  She thought she could use the
NROFF '.cu' command to do the underlining, but it didn't turn out
right and she came to me to see if I could fix it.

Much as I abhor gazing upon our 4.1 BSD NROFF's innards, I did spend
some time looking at the source to learn NROFF's procedure for handling
the '.cu' command.  Essentially NROFF turns on normal underlining and
at the same time translates input spaces to underscores.  Unfortunately
underscores do not break a word, so every word on a line of input text
is glued together into a single massive word and spaces appear where
there were input line breaks.  The result is completely ridiculous in
a bibliography, or indeed anywhere that there is text filling.  As
far as I am concerned, '.cu' is worse than worthless -- why do it at
all if it can't be done correctly?

Has anyone out there fixed this problem before? By a fix, I mean that
it should be possible to have continuously underlined words filled
properly...  If you use ITROFF or System V NROFF (we are licensed for
both), could you check to see if this problem still exists?

Thanks in advance,

Donn Seeley  UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF  ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn