troff underlining problem

[hartley at uvm-gen.UUCP]

> In article <1997 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, 
> harv%ksuvax1.BITNET at WISCVM.arpa (Harvard Townsend) writes:
>> We are running the `troff' which comes with 4.2BSD on a VAX 11/780 (not
>> `ditroff').  Has anyone fixed the way it does underlining?
> 
> The correct thing to do is:  underline single
> words only, either with hyphenation off or with the macro modified to prepend
> \% to the each word; or, stop trying to underline things, and use italics.
> The second choice is better.
> 
Another possibility is to put "\ " or "\0" instead of just a blank between
the words in a phrase to be underlined.  This way the correct length will be
computed by troff.  Still hyphenation problems, though ...