[TUHS] getting nroff to underline in v6,v5

[Ronald Natalie]

And there were a whole slew of filters like nobsp that either stripped out the over(under?)struck characters or reformatted them so it worked on your lineprinter efficently.      I remember the lineprinter we had if you fed it line with a backspace it would print the line up to the backspace and then overstrike it going forward.   If you had multiple backspaces (like a whole sentene) the thing stuck there just doing the overstrike.   It was more efficient to write a filter that changed the _ BS X for each letter to one line of text, a CR (no LF), and then another line of overstrike.

> On Sep 27, 2015, at 11:51 AM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> 
> Mark Longridge scripsit:
> 
>> Maybe there was the ability to use overstrike characters on the teletype?
> 
> That's inherent in the nature of printing terminals: 'X', BS, '_' worked
> fine on all such terminals to produce an underlined X.  Later it was
> found to be better to use '_', BS, 'X', which looked the same on actual
> TTYs or equivalents (LA34/36) and was greatly superior on video terminals.
> 
> -- 
> John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
> Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
> informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
>        --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)
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