Bold style with regular underline

[L Markus]

How can I make text bold but keep the underline regular(non-bold)? I can do it easily in LibreOffice, but when I import the text into Affinity Publisher it makes the decorations as bold as the text and I can't find a way to change it back. I can change color, yes, but not style.

[walt.farrell]

I don't think the underlining options in the Affinity applications give you that capability.

[Seneca]

56 minutes ago, L Markus said:

How can I make text bold but keep the underline regular(non-bold)?

It may have something to do with the font you choose.

I tried that with the lowest common denominator font – Arial – and the thin underline in LibreOffice became a thick underline in Publisher.

I then tried Adobe Caslon Pro and the thickness of the underline hasn't changed in Publisher.

So my suggest is try various fonts and see what you get.

[kenmcd]

1 hour ago, L Markus said:

How can I make text bold but keep the underline regular(non-bold)? I can do it easily in LibreOffice, but when I import the text into Affinity Publisher it makes the decorations as bold as the text and I can't find a way to change it back.

LibreOffice ignores the underline settings in the font and applies its own settings.
APub uses the actual underline settings in the the font, and is "helping you" 😏 by applying the the heavier underline on the run of text. Sooooo helpful. 🤬

Times New Roman has different underline settings in the Regular versus the Bold.
And this is what you see.
Newer fonts use the same underline settings in all the weights in the family.
To avoid annoying stuff like this.

Times New Roman (TNR) is very old, and they do not want to upset current users by making big changes.
Stix Two Text is a much newer font family which is based on the same original sources as TNR,
but it has been optimized and updated for the more current state of electronic publishing.
It is a FOSS font available here: https://github.com/stipub/stixfonts

Below is a sample of both fonts in APub set to 48pt and with enough text to wrap.
Notice how with TNR the middle line all has a bold underline.
And then look at Stix Two Text  - and the underline is the same weight on all three lines.

 

Since it is unlikely this "help" will end anytime soon ...

The work-around is to use a more modern font family which has the same underline settings in all weights of the entire family.

 

[lacerto]

Thanks, this was good to know, especially noting that bold underlining is applied line-wide (or as long as underline formatting on a line is uniformly appled). This would then be different when importing IDML from InDesign, where bold underlining is a character-wide attribute (that is, bold underline is only applied to glyphs that are bold), or when having text that has custom (separately specified) underlining, like in the middle paragraph below:

...so the text above would look like this when imported by opening an IDML file in Affinity Publisher:

[lacerto]

Underlining is not an ideal styling attribute but if continuous underlining is used, it is possible to use zero-width spaces as delimiters with underlining turned off to avoid the default "wide-line" underlining and achieve limited underlining (I guess that if underlining is really wanted to be used with these kinds of contexts, then the default behavior is less disturbing, but knowing the difference to e.g. InDesign -- where character-wide underlining is applied for legacy fonts using bold attribute, as well as for super and subscripts and shifted text also with modern fonts -- might be useful whenever text is imported from IDML):

 

[L Markus]

16 hours ago, Seneca said:

It may have something to do with the font you choose.

 

 

16 hours ago, LibreTraining said:

LibreOffice ignores the underline settings in the font and applies its own settings.
APub uses the actual underline settings in the the font, and is "helping you" 😏 by applying the the heavier underline on the run of text. Sooooo helpful. 🤬

Times New Roman has different underline settings in the Regular versus the Bold.
And this is what you see.
Newer fonts use the same underline settings in all the weights in the family.
To avoid annoying stuff like this.

<snip>

The work-around is to use a more modern font family which has the same underline settings in all weights of the entire family.

 

THANKS to Seneca and LibreTraining! The workaround is simple indeed: for my (rare) underlined bold characters, I'm using Times Bold. It's virtually identical to Times New Roman but has the non-bold underline. It's working for my application (language curriculum, TNR is needed for the special characters) but it wouldn't work for every case.

[kenmcd]

7 hours ago, L Markus said:

The workaround is simple indeed: for my (rare) underlined bold characters, I'm using Times Bold. It's virtually identical to Times New Roman but has the non-bold underline.

What "Times Bold" font are you using?
I thought you meant the version which comes with macOS, but it has different underline settings.
Oddly when I test it, APub does use the thinner underline from the Times-Bold,
but that underline is still a bit bigger than the TNR-Regular underline,
and that does show to me,
so the second line underline is still a bit thicker,
but even stranger is it keeps the position from TNR, not the Times.
So it gets the thickness from the Times-Bold, but the position from the TNR-Regular.
Wadda mess.

So what Times Bold font are you using?
Can you please post an image of your test so we can confirm it is "the same size" underline.
I thought that was a clever work-around, but I also want see if it actually works.
Because in my test it did not.

Still need a font family with all the weights having the same underline settings.