Underline + Bold curiosity

[Bert Coules]

I am trying to produce a line of text which is underlined and in which
several individual words (but not the portions of line which underline
them) are in bold text.

The problem is that when the number of words (or more probably, their
combined length) exceeds a certain amount, Word 2000 automatically
emboldens the entire underline as well. This is not what I want.

Is there a well-concealed setting somewhere which controls this sort
of thing?

Thanks in advance,

Bert
http://www.bertcoules.co.uk





am having difficulty in getting Word 2000 to allow individual words in
a line of text to be emboldened, if the line is itself underlined

 

[Larry]

Interesting. I tried it with a five-word sentence. I could do it with
two words, but when I tried it with three the entire underlining of the
sentence went bold.

I vaguely remember a discussion about this a long time ago. There's a
good reason for this behavior, but I can't tell you what it is. I doubt
that it can be changed.

Larry

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I experimented with this, and it's not the number of words that's
significant but the proportion of the sentence or paragraph. At first I
thought it had to do with selecting the end of the sentence (and thereby
unintentionally including the paragraph mark, but that was because of the
sentence I was using. If I type, "This is a short sentence," I can bold "is
a short" without bolding the underline, but "short sentence" will do it. The
same happens with "A short sentence this is," showing that it's the number
of characters rather than the number of words that's at issue.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Bert Coules]

Suzanne and Larry,

Thanks for the replies and the experimentation. I've been mucking
about further with this and reached the same conclusions.

It seems astonishing - not to mention damnably arrogant of the
programmers - that software this sophisticated won't let me do
something this simple.

There's a good reason for this behaviour...

How can there possibly be? If the software *has* to behave like that
because of the way it's written, then it should be rewritten.

Bert
http://www.bertcoules.co.uk

 

[Bob S]

I experimented with this, and it's not the number of words that's
significant but the proportion of the sentence or paragraph. At first I
thought it had to do with selecting the end of the sentence (and thereby
unintentionally including the paragraph mark, but that was because of the
sentence I was using. If I type, "This is a short sentence," I can bold "is
a short" without bolding the underline, but "short sentence" will do it. The
same happens with "A short sentence this is," showing that it's the number
of characters rather than the number of words that's at issue.

I've been trying it too, with longer sentences. Some things that I
have noticed:

Underline bolding doesn't always happen at the same number of
characters in any given sentence or line, it depends which characters
they are. It is also not a majority of characters or any simple
concept that I have figured out yet.

Whether you apply bold formatting to spaces also makes a difference in
Word's decision to bold the underline.

The underline bolding happens to the line, not to the sentence!

It doesn't happen with the "words only" underlining; in that case each
word has the underline bolded individually when the word is bolded.

The underline bolding happens even when the underline menu does not
offer a bold version of the underline style.

If you use a bold underline style, it gets even bolder, it doesn't
toggle to unbold.

Bob S