(more) nroff questions on italics/underscore

[Dan Messinger]

In article <got to fix rn someday :-)> rcd at opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) writes:
>(Anyone have experience with variable-width characters in nroff--a "poor
>man's" proportional font?)
>
>I actually have a slightly larger
>problem here - not only does it use the literal character, but it assumes
>that it has width t.Char (the value of "Char" in the header part of the
>driving table).  This has confounded my efforts to make any sort of non-
>uniform character width, since the underlining is immediately thrown off.
>
I put together a table to make nroff do proportional spacing on our
printer.  I, too, was surprized by the underline.  I ended up writing
a filter to reduce the multiple ___\b\b\b into single _\b, and then
running it through ul to convert to using the printer's underline mode.
Crude, but the proportional spaced output sure looks nice.
(Dick, if you want my filter, drop me a note)

Dan Messinger
ihnp4!umn-cs!digi-g!dan