Break underlines for descenders and vary underline/strikethrough weight (and position).

[Guest]

Currently in the Affinity range underlines and strikethroughs use a consistent (light) line-weight and run-through descenders, making them less useful than they could otherwise be. It would be preferable if the Affinity range would not only break underlines for descenders, but also vary the line-weight (or make it configurable much like a stroke; set width, dashed/solid, end-caps, colour, offset/position, etc.) in both underline and strikethrough text selections.

Being able to set the position/offset of the underline or strike-though would also be really useful as I often find I would prefer it visually slightly higher, or slightly lower than the default.

 

[loukash]

The way that ID handled it was clunky in its annoying modal window, but at least there were some more options.
And the underline would be placed under the text in z-coordinates, so that you could add a white outline to text (here in light gray to make it visible) to "break" the underline for descenders:

 

The only way to recreate some of these character based effects in APu is to cut the text as a separate text frame, apply paragraph decorations, paste it as an inline object and pray that the text won't reflow upon further editing…

[Guest]

Oh, the way InDesign handles this stuff is truly horrible. I always have to Google for all the various hacks to get it to sort of work. With most browsers now supporting breaking underlines at descenders I find it looks strange/ugly when you run into places where the underlines run-through them.

[loukash]

13 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

it looks strange/ugly when you run into places where the underlines run-through them.

It's usually ugly if the underline runs on top of text. Like in Affinity. :/

Whereas running below text is a Good Thing™. I think I've used such gimmicks quite a few times. Usually it would be for titles, or on layouts like flyers, posters, record covers and the like. Luckily, in those instances it can be recreated using paragraph decorations.

[loukash]

This kind of stuff I want per character, here as pinned–inline-text-frame-with-paragraph-decoration workaround:

[Guest]

I had never seen the paragraph decoration panel?! Thanks for highlighting it, and YES - this, but on a per-character basis would be ideal, especially if it could be mapped to both strike-through and underline formatting and styles (for re-use and consistency). The pinned-inline-text-frame is an interesting (and somewhat horrifying) workaround which makes me cringe when I think about having to check/tweak all of them anytime the document is reflowed.

[loukash]

Another post, another workaround:

To place a character underline at least visually "under" the text, create a global swatch and set it to overprint first, then assign this swatch to the underline.
Of course, this will only work well with dark text on light background.
And there's no preview: You'll have to export to PDF and preview in Acrobat or Reader to check the overprint.

[loukash]

Another post, another workaround – pinned object:

Again, to put the stroke behind the text, either set stroke color to overprint (no preview but works well with PDF/X-1 and 3) or the pinned layer to darken/multiply (works with PDF/X-4).

To spread the underline over multiple lines, simply duplicate it and continue at the line beginning.
Don't forget to adjust on text reflow…

[garrettm30]

I agree with the general point of this thread: we need some more underline controls. I have wanted both width and position, and the optional ability to break at descenders would be interesting as well.

[Lorox]

It's always nice to watch the inventiveness of you guys when it comes to find workarounds to these issues in Publisher we keep findung (and fighting with). I guess I'd never come up with that idea of an underline stroke as pinned object...

If you have just a few places in your design where you need this will be a great help, I guess. All the more as you can obviously format that line/curve very much to your liking (dotted, wavy – whatsoever). In the end, though, it's a separate object and once you change the font or font size you'll have to adjust it anew. But anyway, if there are just a few instances of this sort of character level "decoration", it comes in quite handy. So thanks for sharing the idea!

Nevertheless for me it would be a huge improvement of Publisher's (and Designer's) typographic features if such things could be done via "normal" character styling (plus being able to save such a styling as a character style, of course).

And well, you might say this kind of business is and has been a bit chunky in InDesign using the modal window and so on – BUT to be honest: I'd be glad to have it that way at all in Publisher (as I wrote elsewhere: it's been there in InDesign for 10+ years by now!)... Hope we'll be able to do likewise in Publisher in v2 eventually!

[loukash]

13 minutes ago, Lorox said:

it would be a huge improvement of Publisher's (and Designer's) typographic features if such things could be done via "normal" character styling (plus being able to save such a styling as a character style, of course).

100% agreed!

[loukash]

Another post, another workaround…

 

 

Who's gonna find out?
No pinned objects, just plain ASCII text and character styles.

[John Rostron]

Another workaround: simply remove underlining from letters with descenders. This might sound fiddly, but it could be easier than some of the other workarounds.  It would also preserve the underlining/gaps if the words are restyled.

John

[loukash]

41 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

simply remove underlining from letters with descenders. This might sound fiddly, but it could be easier than some of the other workarounds.  It would also preserve the underlining/gaps if the words are restyled.

If the default underline size and position is good enough, that's actually a brilliant idea!

[loukash]

1 minute ago, loukash said:

remove underlining from letters with descenders

… but if you want to underline a word like… pygmy, there's not much left to underline.
(Or Czech words like pyj, haha.)

[John Rostron]

4 hours ago, loukash said:

… but if you want to underline a word like… pygmy, there's not much left to underline.
(Or Czech words like pyj, haha.)

You can't have it all ways!

John

[MikeW]

Who uses underlining in a layout application? 

So he writes partially tongue in cheek...but only partially. There are better ways to emphasize text, at least body text.

That said, I once set a book the author insisted using underlines throughout the body text. I complied and broke the underlines for descenders. Most authors accept the publisher's substituting other forms of emphasis.

An exception has been several publications where underlining was used for heads/subhead versus better types of emphasis. But those have been government and/or accounting works.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

Who uses underlining in a layout application?

• A designer, as long as they have usable options to style the underline so that it works.
• A hobby designer who doesn't have a clue.

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

There are better ways to emphasize text, at least body text.

• If you don't like underline, don't use it.
• If you're teaching at an art school, tell your students about the "better ways to emphasize text".

In other words, it's not the subject of this thread.

[MikeW]

You could have used underlining where you used italics to make your point...because they would have broken at descenders. 

I don't really care whether you think my comments are pertinent or not.

[dominik]

On 5/14/2021 at 8:02 PM, loukash said:

No pinned objects, just plain ASCII text and character styles.

Since you are not showing the layers panel it's hard to tell if you are using more than one text frame on top of each other. I'd be curious to know how you accomplished this effect. Thanks.

d.

[dominik]

5 minutes ago, dominik said:

Since you are not showing the layers panel it's hard to tell if you are using more than one text frame on top of each other. I'd be curious to know how you accomplished this effect. Thanks.

 

d.

 

[loukash]

2 hours ago, dominik said:

Since you are not showing the layers panel it's hard to tell if you are using more than one text frame on top of each other.

Ah, that's because this is my "workbook" document, and there are other random objects on the spread unrelated to this example.
It is really happening in just one text frame with ASCII characters and text styles only.

2 hours ago, dominik said:

I'd be curious to know how you accomplished this effect.

All right, here you go:

• You can use any character and any font you want, but using the "Low Line" from the same font is obvious and probably most predictable in this context.
• Avoid hyphenation of those underlined words. If you have to hyphenate, insert a second underline and adjust manually again.
• Not sure why the Tracking value effect stops at "-500‰". There's probably a reason, but I'm not a font designer to understand all the details. (You can also use Kerning with the same -500‰ limit when applied directly in text, but it won't work when saved as Text Style.)

[loukash]

10 minutes ago, loukash said:

Not sure why the Tracking value effect stops at "-500‰". There's probably a reason, but I'm not a font designer to understand all the details.

Alright, I think I'm starting to understand: it has to do with the respective character width.
If you want to use e.g. — em-dash as strikethrough, you must enter -1000‰ to fully align with the word beginning. Whereas for an en-dash – -500‰ is it.
 

[loukash]

Word highlight using em-dash:

 

[Lorox]

Nice trick – it took a while for me to understand what's going on here... Especially when the low line character is suddenly "transformed" to that fat orange underline of the entire word when you apply the "Underline" character style.

But you always have to individuallyset the horizontal scaling of the character used for the effect according to the word you're using the effect on, do you? Meaning when you were to do it exactly the same way again on another word with a different length it won't fit immediately (as in the video) because of the given scaling in the text style?