[Techtalk] underlines in console

[Dominik Schramm]

Hi,

Carla Schroder wrote:

>How do I enable underlined words in the console? Example: when I read 
>man pages in an xterm, certain words are underlined. But opening the 
>same man page in a console, the underlines are not there. I've read man 
>terminfo and man ncurses and some others... ? must be answer somewhere!
>  
>

after some reading and trial and error... I don't have a solution but
I think it's either not that easy or impossible.
If you find a solution, please share it. I'm interested in it as well.

When I view a manual page (e.g. man man) certain words appear
underlined in an xterm and bold in the console.

This has to do with the terminal capabilities and I think also the font 
used.
The manual pages I consulted are
console(4), console_codes(4), consolechars(8), tput(1), tset(1), terminfo(5)

console_codes seems to indicate that underlining is always displayed
as bold or using some color.
Why is that?

Both the console and the xterm have the "underline capability",
but when I do

  $ echo `tput smul`hello`tput rmul`

(smul turns underline mode on, rmul turns it off; see terminfo(5))

then the output is bold in the console and underlined in the xterm.
So using the same correct terminal capability leads to different
visual output.

regards,
dominik