Squiggly Underline in Critical Editions

[Stefan Baums]

Dear Peter and Dominik,

should underlines (squiggly or other) be considered characters at
all?  I think of them as additional information added above the
character level (e.g., by a Word processor’s underline function or
an HTML tag).  As such, I am not convinced that they should be
part of Unicode at all.  Also, if underlining is handled as a
graphical device above the character level, then the problem that
Dominik mentioned (oscilloscope effect) would not occur.

To illustrate, I took the following snippet from Nala and added
some squiggly underlining in OpenOffice:

   http://students.washington.edu/baums/tmp/squiggly_underline.pdf

That was straightforward in principle, though the implementation
could be improved (the squiggle currently overlaps with subscript
vowel signs etc.).

All best,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Baums
Asian Languages and Literature
University of Washington