Underline too thin and close to the text?

• iTerm2 version: Latest Nightly
• OS version: 10.11.6

I just updated to the latest nightly and noticed that the underline is really thin and also really close to the text! Wouldn't be possible to have it like a pixel bigger and a pixel below the current position?

I also noticed that the underline is broken when there are characters that would pass through it, which is really cool! But would it be possible to make the "space" around these characters bigger? Because especially when using smaller font sizes (like 12-13) it looks like it is just badly rendered and not broken into pieces, so I think more space would solve that! I'm using a retina display, not sure it may impact something!

Which font are you using? I'm still fine tuning this so it's helpful to reproduce your issue. Each font renders underlines a little differently.

Sorry for late reply. I'm using Source Code Pro from https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro at the 12 pt size. As i said I think it would a lot better with a pixel more of distance between the text and the underline and a bigger underline. With that changes you can have more distance between the underline segments when there are characters that break it. I hardcoded some changes just to test how it would look in comparison: before: after:

before: after: As you can see I think the after screenshot look more cohesive in my opinion. These screenshot also don't really give justice because in the terminal 12pt look a lot smaller and the differences really help a lot, try to zoom out these screenshots to have a better idea.

Some improvements in commit d94c5963

Here's a couple of changes I made myself

diff --git a/sources/iTermTextDrawingHelper.m b/sources/iTermTextDrawingHelper.m
index e5dfff3..55a08e3 100644
--- a/sources/iTermTextDrawingHelper.m
+++ b/sources/iTermTextDrawingHelper.m
@@ -1703,10 +1703,10 @@ static BOOL iTermTextDrawingHelperIsCharacterDrawable(screen_char_t *c,
     }
 
     NSPoint origin = NSMakePoint(startPoint.x,
-                                 [self retinaRound:startPoint.y + _cellSize.height + underlineOffset]);
+                                 round(startPoint.y + _cellSize.height + underlineOffset));
     [path moveToPoint:origin];
     [path lineToPoint:NSMakePoint(origin.x + runWidth, origin.y)];
-    [path setLineWidth:MAX(1, [self retinaRound:font.underlineThickness])];
+    [path setLineWidth:MAX(0.75, [self retinaRound:font.underlineThickness])];
     [path stroke];
 }
 

First I propose to NOT use retina round for the distance, since on both my retina screens even with thinner strokes, it looks a lot better without that scaling (tried source code pro and fira code at 12pt) Second I would set the max value to 0.75 for line width. The cool thing that this does is keeping the size to 1 but automatically altering the color to make it less prominent. This look a lot better because text is basically never of the pure color you set when rendered, to look smoother; instead when the path is draw you'd have 2 (1 on non retina) pixels full of the exact color and it jumps to much on the eye in my opinion.

The first retinaRound call doesn't affect the thickness, but it just lets the underlineOffset be aligned to the pixel grid instead of the point grid.

I agree that a .75 thick line looks better. Changed in commit 40fe7dc9].

Personally, I agree with John, I use the same font and size and with the above change seems more clear to me.

With change above for distance of the underline:

Without:

Also I'm having an issue with underline, but only inside tmux so not sure it's iTerm issue, will investigate more.

Milestone changed to %Feature Complete 3.1

I'm running this by a few more people to see what the general preference is. I'm leaning toward the looser spacing as well.

Commit 8d9a4c47 tries to improve this by placing the underline below the baseline by no less than 40% of the x-height (and no more than 50%). This works better for very small type (the fixed minimum caused it to get hidden beneath the next line), and is looser for 12ish point text than the 2 point minimum.

closed