Why can we format text with bold and italic but not underline?

Question

Why is it that italic and bold formatting is available while underline is not?

I guess it is voluntary, I'm just wondering why that would be the case.

Answer 1

Underlining as a typographic means of emphasis is a relic of typewriters and handwriting. I'm not saying these two are dead (at least not both of them), but underlining is far inferior to bolding (for emphasizing and having it stand out from the rest of the text) and italicizing (for emphasizing but leaving the text's gray value intact, thus not standing out).

Using underlining for emphasis is only for when you have no other way. And we certainly do.

In addition, Juhana is right; on the web, underlining means "clickable".

Answer 2

You can u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲ t̲e̲x̲t̲ by using the unicode combining character U+0332:

u̲n̲d̲e̲r̲l̲i̲n̲e̲d̲

Use this bookmarklet to underline the selected text in the active input control:

javascript:(function(){var el=document.activeElement,$el=$(el),start=el.selectionStart,end=el.selectionEnd,val=$el.val(),text=val.substring(start,end).replace(/\S/g,"$&\u0332");$el.val(val.substring(0,start)+text+val.substring(end));el.selectionStart=start;el.selectionEnd=start+text.length})();void 0;

Answer 3

On the web, an underline denotes a clickable link.

We do not and should not encourage contributors to create confusion by underlining regular text.

Answer 4

t͟e͟s͟t͟i͟n͟g͟ ͟i͟f͟ ͟t͟o͟o͟l͟s͟ ͟w͟o͟r͟k͟s͟

Nice!

So this is the tool: https://yaytext.com/underline/

Just enter the text there, copy the underlined text, and paste it in stackoverflow:

If the previous tool is removed in the future, what I did to found it is searching on Google:

underline characters online

Answer 5

First, some background, to get us all on the same page.

• Italicizing is one way in which to emphasize text in a passage. Italics are the most subtle form of typographic emphasis in common use, and are really only noticeable while reading the passage containing them.

• Bolding is another way in which one can emphasize text. This is a very significant jump in emphasis, easily drawing the eye, even when one is not currently reading the passage utilizing the bold text.

• Underlining is simply a third way in which one can emphasize text. The strength of its emphasis lies between that of italics and bold text, slightly drawing the eye to the text but not demanding attention the way bold text does. In some people's eyes this could provide for a more nuanced gradation of emphasis than is available with the two (arguably three when you combine them) available forms of emphasis.

Now, as to why underlining is disallowed:

• There is fairly coherent argument that the use of underlines as text decorators for prose would lead to confusion, since people associate underlined text with web links. Of course, this argument has lost some of its strength since many websites have moved away from using underlines to identify links and toward the use of bold text of a different color than typical prose instead. Perhaps in a decade it will be bold text that is deprecated because of confusion.

• Additionally, there is a fairly widely held (but not universal) subjective belief that underlining is unsightly and detracts from the readability of a passage. Since this is subjective, one who believes that underlined text is unsightly cannot be convinced to find it otherwise any more than someone who dislikes Leonardo da Vinci's art could be convinced to reconsider. You like what you like, and you dislike what you dislike.

• There is also a common argument that the underlining of text damages the descenders of certain letters and punctuation (for example, these characters: qypgj;, and in some fonts f). This particular argument falls short of being persuasive, since such observances depend entirely upon the font, rendering engine, and settings in use (hence the existence of the CSS property text-underline-offset), and is largely untrue for modern fonts especially on pages with well considered CSS design. For instance: Some judge that underlined quotes, particularly those presenting with many descenders are overly obscured by underlines; but as you can see this is largely untrue.

• The fourth and most meaningful reason for underlining to be unavailable is this. There has evolved a cultural more (môr' ā) that predisposes certain people to place emotional weight to the argument that this should be the case. This is so much the case that any possible argument to the contrary is often simply dismissed without consideration or analysis. Those who have integrated this more with their value system have a natural revulsion to accepting underlines in much the same way that Western peoples have a revulsion to dining on members of the biological class insecta while happily dining on other members of the phylum arthropoda.

So, in the end, the reason why we cannot underline, while we can use bold and italics, is that putting this rule in place was not a strictly rational decision, but rather, a cultural and emotional decision, born out of preference and recent tradition and justified by subjective and--in some cases--arguably spurious claims. Further, any argument to the contrary is met with an us-against-them tribalism that only goes to demonstrate the emotional grounding of the position.

TLDR

A larger proportion of the people in place to make such decisions dislike underlines, some of them passionately. In many cases they take any request to allow underlines as an affront rather than as a collaborative request to work together to improve everyone's collective experience here in the Stack community. Their preference, in this case, is the rule, and it's their collection of websites, so we have to play by their rules.

Edit (2024-09-02) - Perhaps a more collaborative (and accurate) way for me to state my final TLDR point is this. The Stack community is about finding best solutions by developing community consensus (which is why the solutions with more community support bubble to the top). The current consensus leans towards keeping underlines out of the repertoire, so based on expressed community preference, that is how things will remain.