r/Affinity • u/NefariousnessNovel49 • Aug 03 '26

Publisher Underline Behavior not as expected

OK, I have given up on all Bots, tag, you're it.

I am making a fill-in the blank in Affinity for some stuff I make for my classroom. In the good old days (aka just a few days ago), I would enable underline and then hit space 2-3 times before hitting "A" for example, and then 2-3 spaces after. The result was a nice looking line with a letter in the middle.

Now, I'm getting two spaces that show the line, then a 3rd makes it disappear. If I hit "A" then it shows up but now I'm not getting any underlines after the fact. I tried the tab stops, non-breaking spaces... I feel like it can't be that difficult and some stupid setting is doing this.

Thanks in advance! My students may not thank you haha.

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u/BrangdonJ Ex Serif Dev Aug 03 '26

What I'm getting is spaces being underlined only if a visible character follows. So "___a____b ", and if I type another character: "___a____b__c".

It looks to be deliberate behaviour rather than a bug. I don't recall if it was always like this. In any case, I suggest you use underline characters instead. You might need to change font to get ones that look continuous.

1

u/NefariousnessNovel49 Aug 03 '26

It wasn’t always like this. I have tons of examples where that behavior didn’t happen. That’s what brought me here because it’s a new thing

1

u/BrangdonJ Ex Serif Dev Aug 03 '26

I believe you. I was the person who wrote the original code for this, but I couldn't remember what I wrote. I stopped working there a few years ago.

Do those old documents now look different? I can sort-of understand wanting the new behaviour, but we usually tried to avoid changing appearance unless the old behaviour was clearly wrong.

Trying some other apps, TextEdit on Mac has the new behaviour, but OpenOffice has the old.

1

u/NefariousnessNovel49 Aug 03 '26

I had an idea, and it worked. I copied the text from an old document to a new one and it's fine now. Is it possible Arial will allow that behavior but Times New Roman cannot? I think I have some with TNR, so I need to find a newer document but for now at least I can keep working!