GeezerVison

let me take a look

@jklymak can you take a look? Super late getting to this, but I think it's done

@QuLogic you can remove the "work in progress" tag for this. It's ready to be reviewed. Thanks!

@wesbarnett popping to draft until the rebase gets figured out.... You may need to follow instructions at https://discourse.matplotlib.org/t/default-branch-renamed-with-minor-edit-to-history/22367/2 Thanks!

There haven't been any updates here for a while. Unless I am mistaken, this is not extremely hard to implement. The details are in node 735 of TeX, but it doesn't look that's what's happening here?

I think mimicking TeX's behaviour is straightforward. Not sure how exactly overline works, but TeX puts a space between the text and the underline equal to thrice the thickness of the underline (even if the text has depth). Just adding vertical kerning should work?

I can open another pull request to implement it if that's okay.

I think mimicking TeX's behaviour is straightforward. Not sure how exactly overline works, but TeX puts a space between the text and the underline equal to thrice the thickness of the underline (even if the text has depth). Just adding vertical kerning should work?

I can open another pull request to implement it if that's okay.

I'm not a TeX expert, but if you have a straight-forward solution, please go ahead and open a new PR.

Since this Pull Request has not been updated in 60 days, it has been marked "inactive." This does not mean that it will be closed, though it may be moved to a "Draft" state. This helps maintainers prioritize their reviewing efforts. You can pick the PR back up anytime - please ping us if you need a review or guidance to move the PR forward! If you do not plan on continuing the work, please let us know so that we can either find someone to take the PR over, or close it.

It looks like there are two PRs trying to solve the same issue here - this one and #23616. Any chance @wesbarnett and @tfpf could team up or review each other's work so this feature can move forward? Thanks!

Looks like @tfpf opened the other PR because this one had stalled....

Initially, I though this approach could be improved by applying the make_under procedure of TeX (node 735 in TeX: the Program). To my utter surprise, wesbarnett's code (from here) and the TeX code (from #23616) produce the exact same images! Unless I have terribly messed something up, the PNG files are identical, byte for byte; the SVG files are also identical, at least visually.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
plt.text(.5, .5, r'$\underline{ul}$', size=50)
plt.axhline(.5)
plt.savefig('s.svg')
plt.savefig('p.png')
plt.show()

Note that the SVG and PNG backends render the image differently. I got stuck here, and documented it in #23763. Still unable to figure out why that happens.

My PR is so far off with main at this point, I'm happy to close this as a duplicate of #23616. (My implementation was basically copying the overline functionality and making a few adjustments for it to be used as an underline.