On Jan 13, 2012, at 00:40, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote: > (snip, someone wrote) >> You've sometimes admonished me for taking the synchronic view >> rather than the diachronic. But here, you're being narrowly >> synchronic. In the Bad Old Days of Yore, mechanical serial >> printers could be commanded to underscore with the sequence >> <underscore><backspace><character-to-be-underscored>. In this >> diachronic perspective, "underscore" is not a misnomer, merely >> antiquated. > > No, you write a second line with a '+' as carriage control character. > Not "No". I said "serial". While you supplied additional correct information, you have no ground to dispute the correctness of what I said concerning at least some devices.
But, surely, Mr. Gilmore is old enough to remember the technique, and accept at least the historical validity of the term. For compatibility with certain devices, such as display terminals which did not support overstriking but simply displayed the last character sent to any position, I adopted the practice of sending the underscores first. Otherwise, I'd see nothing but underscored lacunæ. > This is even so popular as to be a special case for the 3800, which > otherwise does not allow writing two characters on one print column. > I remember that. IIRC also alas, sending the underscores first did (does?) not work with the 3800. How silly; why not? > Presumably it builds a record in a buffer, allowing overprint with > different fonts, and a special bit to indicate underlining. > > With ink and ribbon printers, you can get darker print (bold-like) > by overprinting the same characters using '+', though I believe > that the 3800 also doesn't do that. > I believe that with some device I successfully offset the second line by one or a few pixels diagonally in order to highlight. It should work with PostScript. -- gil
