Underlining that skips characters with descenders
While it is a last resort in typography, when I do underline I prefer it to be just below the baseline. But this default underline overlaps descenders. Rather than having to lower underlines to avoid these clashes, could the Underline Options panel or another feature detect when an underline will overlap a descender and skip that character? - Thanks!
Nicholas Edlund
shared this idea
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Matt
commented
I just noticed this feature works automatically in Adobe XD for reasons I don't know. But the fact this still hasn't been implemented in InDesign puzzles me.
So many designers use underlines for stylistic reasons on headlines nowadays and it just looks stupid without the gap. Am I missing something or why has this request only 5 votes? Does the feature already exist and I just can't find it? This is weird.
Oh, and of course I've been using the outline effect described here. However this method isn't always an option, depending on the background. -
Mike Craghead
commented
There are a few workarounds here: https://indesignsecrets.com/breaking-underlines-descenders.php
I've used the "blend mode" trick and it looks great.One downside (as of 7/18/2019): when a PDF is generated, the underlined text is broken into a silly number of separate tags, like instead of [here's a line of text], you get [the capitol letter and all the letters up to the first descender], then [the letter with the descender], then [a path], then [more letters until the next descender], and so on. So what should be a single tag ends up being several. It still reads out loud okay in screen reader software, but it makes for a messy tag tree, see attached image.
I'd like to see a "descender interrupts underline" option that could be turned on and off.
Cheers!
Mike
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Duncan
commented
Perhaps this could work as "text-decoration-skip: ink" does in CSS?
