[XeTeX] Underline thickness and position for Type1

[James Crippen]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 13:51, Jonathan Kew <jfkthame at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Is there a compelling reason this should be handled differently?
> Underlining is not generally considered good typographic practice; it is
> usually a hand- or type-written substitute for italics or other typeface
> choices that were not available via more limited technologies.

I generally agree with you, but want to point out one situation where
I've seen it used in professional typography, specifically in
linguistics examples. Underlining may be used to highlight specific
parts of the gloss of an example, usually on the morpheme gloss tier
with small caps abbreviations and symbols. I think this is done
because bolding or italicization would change the width of the example
and thereby screw up the line breaking, particularly for long examples
that barely fit on one line. Another reason might be that bold and
italic are often not available for small caps, depending on the font.
I've seen it in a number of books which are otherwise of excellent
typographic quality, so it appears to be thoughtfully intentional.

James